How effective have European counterterrorism efforts been at stopping attacks?
It’s difficult to gauge success by the numbers. Law-enforcement agencies throughout Europe have arrested hundreds of suspected terrorists since Sept. 11, but arrests don’t always correspond to specific thwarted attacks. The secretive nature of counterterrorism also obscures what threats have been averted. Over the years, some thwarted attacks have become public, including a plan to crash a hijacked airplane into the Eiffel Tower in 1994; threats against U.S. embassies in Paris and Rome; and a scheme to drive a truck bomb into Spain’s National Court in 2004. Overall success can be measured by the absence of attacks. Except for the Madrid train bombings of March 2004, Europe has been fairly free of tragedy on a large scale. Read a chronology of some of the attacks that have been thwarted.
