"We plan not to compete with NATO but to cooperate," Nikolai Bordyuzha, secretary general of the six-nation Collective Security Treaty Organisation, said after the meeting in Kyrgyzstan.

The organisation, comprising Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and mainly funded by Moscow, seeks to combine its members' capabilities and to act as a buffer with nearby Afghanistan.

"Today we've discussed different areas of future cooperation with the (NATO) alliance," Bordyuzha told journalists.

The Moscow-led grouping recently oversaw the establishment of a Russian airbase in Kyrgyzstan not far from a base where some 1,000 US-led forces have been posted for operations in Afghanistan.

There have been persistant rumours that Russia's top brass would like to see an end to the presence of Western forces in Kyrgyzstan, but participants in Wednesday's meeting gave no hint of this.

NATO, the West's primary military alliance, took command of the 5,300-strong International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan in August.

"Step by step the Cold War has ended and now we face a common enemy: international terrorism," Kyrgyzstan's Foreign Minister Askar Aitmatov said.

It remained unclear however what new forms of cooperation the ex-Soviet grouping envisages with NATO, and a number of foreign ministers were absent including Russia's Igor Ivanov, who sent Bordyuzha in his place.

NATO Secretary General George Robertson recently paid a number of visits to ex-Soviet Central Asia and signalled a wish to intensify cooperation so far mainly confined to "soft" security operations such as practicing disaster relief techniques.

TERRA.WIRE