A suicide bomber attacked a rally held by Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi this morning, killing Bhutto and at least 15 of her supporters.

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto is an alarming development for Pakistan and for the entire region as well as for the United States and U.S. foreign policy. This morning, a suicide bomber shot Bhutto five times and then detonated a bomb at a rally of the People’s Party of Pakistan (PPP). Bhutto died in hospital at 6:16 p.m. local time and more than 20 people were killed in the bomb blast.

A former prime minister and daughter of another former prime minister, Bhutto was far and away the most popular politician in Pakistan and was positioned to win the upcoming elections in Pakistan. George W. Bush and Condoleeza Rice had pinned their hopes on a power-sharing deal between Bhutto and Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s self-declared president, who came to power in a coup d’etat and who has resisted free and fair elections since then.

Bhutto herself was negotiating with Musharraf — with the encouragement of the Bush administration — a deal in which she would become prime minister if her People’s Party won elections as expected and Musharraf would continue on as president, an arrangement that many observers as well as administration officials believed was the best hope of leading Pakistan out of its current political crisis.

As with Russia and so many other countries, the Bush administration has seen bilateral relations with Pakistan as relations with one individual, but that is risky business when the unelected president (Musharraf, that is) is a dictator with diminishing political support in the country. The over-personalization of U.S. relations with Pakistan has made it difficult for Bush and Rice to think outside of the box of their own creation, with the president and secretary of state until recently seeing Musharraf as the only alternative to a take-over of the country by Islamic fundamentalist extremists.

But the assassination of Benazir Bhutto underlines yet another fault of Bush administration foreign policy, which has been excessively focused on the potential nuclear threat posed by Iran while until recently largely ignoring the very real threat of a Pakistan which already has nuclear weapons becoming the first nuclear state controlled by allies of Al-Qaeda.

The death of Benazir Bhutto also means the death of Bush’s Pakistan policy, with grave implications for Pakistan, Afghanistan, South Asia, the Middle East and the world.