WI: European 9/11 (2010)

In 2011, al-Qaeda evidently made plans for a major attack on Europe, specifically London, Paris, and Berlin. The apparent plan was to launch coordinated Mumbai/Paris-style attacks in each city (I.e., teams of gunmen and suicide bombers attacking multiple soft targets across the city to inflict maximum damage and frustrate a unified police response). Several radicalized citizens from each of the countries left for camps in tribal Pakistan, where they were to recieve training before heading back home to commit the attacks.

The plan was thwarted after it’s discovery by Western intelligence, after which US drone strikes in tribal Pakistan killed much of the al-Qaeda leadership and militants associated with the planned attacks.

What if the plot had somehow avoided the detection of western intelligence and was successfully carried out? Considering the high death tolls of both the Mumbai and Paris attacks of OTL, depending on police response and such we could very easily have seen several hundred dead as a result of this plot.
 
An escalation on the war in terror is certain but more interestingly I’d expect a very different western relationship to the Arab Spring than in OTL.

The Arab Spring involved Islamic group’s at its heart and the equation of instability vs. authoritarianism would change if a 9/11 scale terrorist attack took place in 2010. We might not see NATO bombing in Libya.
 
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