"I've been out for a very long time -- since 1999. The people need to hear from me," the exiled opposition leader told Reuters. "If the people of Pakistan honour me with that position, I would like to come back as prime minister."

Benazir and exiled former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, once a bitter rival, formed the multi-party Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy after President Pervez Musharraf seized power in 1999 in a bloodless coup.

Both want to return to Pakistan but Musharraf has vowed to block that and has dismissed a growing alliance between her Pakistan Peoples Party and Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League as irrelevant.

He has accused both of corruption -- allegations they deny -- and most people believe that, with Sharif and Benazir outside the country, elections by the end of 2007 will return national and provincial assemblies that will vote Musharraf in again.

"If the leaders of the religious parties should be allowed to campaign in Pakistan, the leaders of the moderate parties should be allowed to return to Pakistan and campaign," Benazir said after attending a conference in Boston.

Benazir said a blast near Musharraf's army residence in the northern city of Rawalpindi on Wednesday showed that terrorism was reaching deeper into Pakistani cities, partly because militants still thrive in Islamic seminaries, or madrasas.

"This is a worrying decline in the stability of the society," said Benazir, whose two terms as premier in the late 1980s and mid 1990s were cut short amid graft accusations.

Benazir, 53, lives in Dubai. Wearing a white traditional Muslim headscarf, she said her 10 years in opposition have been some of the worst of her life although she said she was happy for the opportunity to raise her three children.

She disagreed with what she said was an unfair portrayal of her father -- deposed premier Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who was executed by Pakistan's military in 1979 -- in Musharraf's new memoirs "In the Line of Fire", and she said she wants to write her own autobiography.

"Right now I am very much involved in the struggle for the restoration of democracy in Pakistan. The time is not right."

She urged the military-backed government to do more to oust foreign-born militants from Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal region and to stand up to the madrasas, which she described as poorly regulated and a "breeding ground for intolerance."

The madrasas, meant to provide Islamic education, became radicalised in the 1980s when Pakistan, US and Saudi intelligence services began training their students to attack Soviet forces in neighbouring Afghanistan.

"If we cannot control our own areas from the militants how are we going to control them from crossing into Afghanistan and destabilising (Afghan President Hamid) Karzai," she said.