It's the Ideology

Steyn points out that whether the Bombay attacks were perpetrated by AQ, LET, the ISI doesn't matter much. Because they are symptoms, not the cause. Likewise, worrying about whether Iraq or Afghanistan is the "right war" is pointless, because again, we are dealing with the symptoms, not the ultimate cause.

It's missing the point to get into debates about whether this is the
"Deccan Mujahideen" or the ISI or al-Qaida or Lashkar-e-Taiba. That's a
reductive argument. It could be all or none of them. The ideology has been so
successfully seeded around the world that nobody needs a memo from corporate HQ
to act: There are so many of these subgroups and individuals that they intersect
across the planet in a million different ways. It's not the Cold War, with a
small network of deep sleepers being directly controlled by Moscow. There are no
membership cards, only an ideology. That's what has radicalized hitherto
moderate Muslim communities from Indonesia to the central Asian 'stans to
Yorkshire, and co-opted what started out as more or less conventional
nationalist struggles in the Caucasus and the Balkans into mere tentacles of the
global jihad.