As the death toll continues to rise from today’s terrorist carnage in Mumbai, several news reports, invariably using the qualifier “previously unknown group,” have identified the Deccan Mujahideen as being responsible for the slaughter.

Blake Hounshell on the Foreign Policy blog notes that the “pattern of attacks” on ten sites - which have so far claimed more than 80 lives and upwards of 200 injuries, and which involved the taking of hostages at the luxury Taj and Oberoi hotels (where guests were asked to show their passports to determine if they were American or British) - suggests “that Lashkar-e-Taiba, a nasty Islamist organization based in Lahore, Pakistan, and with a significant presence in Kashmir and links to al Qaeda, may be to blame.”

Hounshell continues:

Here’s where it gets interesting — and I stress here that I am just speculating. Lashkar-e-Taiba’s main goal is to expel India from Kashmir. In the past, some have accused elements of the Pakistani military and intelligence services of having ties to the group. Pakistan’s government has always hotly denied such accusations.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has in recent weeks moved closer to the United States, made some significant gestures toward India, and moved to shut down the political wing of the ISI, Pakisan’s powerful intelligence service (that’s the unit that tries to steal elections). How likely is it that some angry “rogue elements” of the ISI, aligned with Kashmiri jihadists and a team of Indian domestic extremists, sought to head off these moves? I have no idea, but it’s definitely a theory worth exploring.

Absolutely. As is the theory that the Deccan Mujahideen is really the Indian Mujahideen, which has claimed responsibility for attacks in a number of different cities over the past several months and could well be behind the assaults in Mumbai.

No doubt, though, the usual voices charging that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is to blame will emerge soon enough.