WASHINGTON, Jan 30: Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto has said that she is noticing a change in Washington’s attitude towards Pakistan as US policy makers now have also started to “see the people of the country.”

“I am happy to see after a long time people of Pakistan are getting a mention here in Washington too,” Ms Bhutto told her supporters at a Sunday evening rally in Rockville, Maryland.

The PPP chairperson did not give any date for returning home in her speech, as some of her supporters had expected, but did say that she planned to return to Pakistan soon.

“I have to go soon. Whether I go on my own or I am forced to go, it does not matter. I have to go,” she said while referring to the Interpol red notices.

“I believe that I must go back to help Pakistan’s democratization process before the next general election,” Ms Bhutto said on CNN’s Late Edition programme. “I don’t want the moderates squeezed out.”

She said that while it was a possibility that she would be arrested if she returned to Pakistan, she was not afraid of ‘red notices or red permits’.

Ms Bhutto, who was invited last week to address a press conference at Voice of America headquarters, said she also had noticed a change in the attitude of the US media towards Pakistan.

She said the search for Al Qaeda terrorists and Taliban members in the rugged mountainous border with Afghanistan was hampered by the Musharraf government’s lack of broad political support. “The area is difficult, but one can make a strategy to gain control,” Ms Bhutto said.

Gen Musharraf “may be doing the best he can, but he’s a military leader” and therefore doesn’t have the popular support a political leader would, she said.

Referring to President Musharraf’s interview to the Washington Post published on Sunday, Ms Bhutto quoted him as telling the Bush administration that there was no military solution to the threat of terrorism.

“If this is so, why is he creating new threats for Pakistan by using the military in Balochistan,” she asked.

Ms Bhutto said that at least 600 soldiers and hundreds of civilians had been killed in Waziristan and yet extremists continued to control the area. “Their control is so strong that they murder anybody who opposes them,” she said.

“There’s no military solution to the problems of Pakistan either. There’s only one course, restoring democracy and the sooner it’s done, the better it would be for the country and the region,” she said.