Washington Post: Quake relief cash funds bomb plot.

If the money was transferred to Jamaat ad-Dawa as the article says, it's not a long leap to al-Qaeda at all. The history of Jamaat ad-Dawa (JD, "Organization of the (Muslim) Call/Teaching") is pretty straightforward.

The grandparent organization is Markaz Ad-Dawat Wal Irshad (MDI, "Center for Teaching and Guidance") originally created in 1987 by bin Laden mentor Abdullah Azzam and two Pakistani professors, Hafiz Saeed and Zafar Iqbal. MDI's more famous paramilitary force, Lashkar-i-Taiba (LiT, "Army of the Pure") was and remains active in Kashmir and even within India proper, operating with more or less a hands-off blessing from the Pakistani government. LiT's main goal is the installation of Muslim rule within Kashmir, Junagarh in Gujarat, and Hyderabad, as well as creating explicitly Muslim rule in Pakistan.

After the 2001 attacks, the U.S. pressured Pakistan to shut down MDI; as a result, the group was technically banned, but really underwent a name change to Jamaat ad-Dawa and, on the surface, changed its mission to charity and relief. (As noted in this WaPo article, it's practically the disaster relief organization of choice in much of Pakistan.) Although Hafiz Saeed supposedly stepped down as organization leader in 2002, he's assumed to still be running the show. Zafar Iqbal subsequently formed his own splinter faction due to personality and tactical disagreements, and now runs Khairun Naas (KN, "People's Welfare"). This originally appeared to be a serious blow to JD and LiT, but now seems to have done little damage to LiT's operational capability, leading some though not a majority of analysts to suspect that the split was encouraged by Pakistan for control purposes.

What is new about this story is that MDI and LiT have always concentrated on Subcontinent targets: if they've moved into enabling attacks against the "far enemy" in Europe and America, then we've moved into an environment where our own security is much more closely tied to the status of Kashmir than previously thought. Pakistan is unlikely to give up its ace card -- terrorists and guerillas -- in the disupted territories without significant incentives, so where do we take the diplomatic heavy lifting from here?