Once the news cycle moves on, it will be business as usual for the US, the Taliban and even al-Qaeda itself.

Every organization devoted to mass death needs a charmless, bespectacled, blank-eyed chief operating officer who inspires no one but keeps the gears of murder turning. Ayman al-Zawahiri was Osama bin Laden’s Himmler. President Biden and most Americans will see his death as just revenge for the three thousand innocents killed by Al Qaeda in the United States on September 11, 2001—and so it is. But I have to admit that Zawahiri’s end leaves me cold. Revenge is sour because it always comes too late. Three thousand to one: the numbers provide no comfort.

And think of Zawahiri’s other victims. Most of them were Muslims whose names are not carved in stone. It’s staggering to think how many human beings are no longer alive because this doctor from a prosperous Egyptian family embraced a hateful ideology that licensed him to kill. There was Shayma Abdel Halim, an 11-year-old schoolgirl, killed in 1993 in a Cairo suburb by a car bomb that Islamic Jihad, a terror group that Zawahiri later merged into Al Qaeda, intended for an Egyptian prime minister. There were the hundreds of Kenyans and Tanzanians murdered in Al Qaeda’s bombings of U.S. embassies in 1998.

Remember the tens of thousands of Iraqis, most of them Shia, blown to pieces, shot to death, or beheaded by Al Qaeda’s local affiliate. At one point Al Qaeda in Iraq went on a killing spree of bakers in Baghdad. The body count in Iraq grew so high that Zawahiri worried it might hurt Al Qaeda’s image among the world’s Muslims. Think of all the Afghans, Pakistanis, Indonesians, Australians, Turkish, Spanish, British, Moroccans, Syrians, Malians, and others who perished in all the suicide bombings and executions carried out over the past quarter century with Zawahiri’s approval. Perhaps one day the names will be recorded in a memorial or museum or database somewhere, under a heading that says: “Ayman al-Zawahiri’s victims.”

In another ledger are the names of all the people killed in the wars America started with the stated purpose of eliminating Zawahiri’s organization—morally not equivalent, but just as surely dead. I don’t know how to weigh the balance and come up with a final reckoning, but I know that this revenge is sour. It’s particularly sour when you think about the circumstances of Zawahiri’s death. He was killed by a drone strike while standing on the balcony of a house in Sherpur, an upscale Kabul neighborhood that Afghanistan’s corrupt rulers have long called home. Apparently, Zawahiri had been in Kabul for several weeks, in violation of the Taliban’s pledge not to host terrorists. The deal leading to the departure of the last U.S. troops was signed and executed with lies and self-delusions.

Zawahiri is dead. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are back in business running Afghanistan, eliminating opponents and erasing women with the ideology that, three decades ago, gave Zawahiri the right to kill an 11-year-old schoolgirl. Americans might feel safer—might even feel a measure of satisfaction. The least we can do is spare a thought for everyone else.

Taliban condemns the drone strike, calling it a 'clear violation' of international principles and 2020 Doha Agreement.

Every organization devoted to mass death needs a charmless, bespectacled, blank-eyed chief operating officer who inspires no one but keeps the gears of murder turning. Ayman al-Zawahiri was Osama bin Laden’s Himmler. President Biden and most Americans will see his death as just revenge for the three thousand innocents killed by Al Qaeda in the United States on September 11, 2001—and so it is. But I have to admit that Zawahiri’s end leaves me cold. Revenge is sour because it always comes too late. Three thousand to one: the numbers provide no comfort.

And think of Zawahiri’s other victims. Most of them were Muslims whose names are not carved in stone. It’s staggering to think how many human beings are no longer alive because this doctor from a prosperous Egyptian family embraced a hateful ideology that licensed him to kill. There was Shayma Abdel Halim, an 11-year-old schoolgirl, killed in 1993 in a Cairo suburb by a car bomb that Islamic Jihad, a terror group that Zawahiri later merged into Al Qaeda, intended for an Egyptian prime minister. There were the hundreds of Kenyans and Tanzanians murdered in Al Qaeda’s bombings of U.S. embassies in 1998.

Remember the tens of thousands of Iraqis, most of them Shia, blown to pieces, shot to death, or beheaded by Al Qaeda’s local affiliate. At one point Al Qaeda in Iraq went on a killing spree of bakers in Baghdad. The body count in Iraq grew so high that Zawahiri worried it might hurt Al Qaeda’s image among the world’s Muslims. Think of all the Afghans, Pakistanis, Indonesians, Australians, Turkish, Spanish, British, Moroccans, Syrians, Malians, and others who perished in all the suicide bombings and executions carried out over the past quarter century with Zawahiri’s approval. Perhaps one day the names will be recorded in a memorial or museum or database somewhere, under a heading that says: “Ayman al-Zawahiri’s victims.”

In another ledger are the names of all the people killed in the wars America started with the stated purpose of eliminating Zawahiri’s organization—morally not equivalent, but just as surely dead. I don’t know how to weigh the balance and come up with a final reckoning, but I know that this revenge is sour. It’s particularly sour when you think about the circumstances of Zawahiri’s death. He was killed by a drone strike while standing on the balcony of a house in Sherpur, an upscale Kabul neighborhood that Afghanistan’s corrupt rulers have long called home. Apparently, Zawahiri had been in Kabul for several weeks, in violation of the Taliban’s pledge not to host terrorists. The deal leading to the departure of the last U.S. troops was signed and executed with lies and self-delusions.

Zawahiri is dead. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are back in business running Afghanistan, eliminating opponents and erasing women with the ideology that, three decades ago, gave Zawahiri the right to kill an 11-year-old schoolgirl. Americans might feel safer—might even feel a measure of satisfaction. The least we can do is spare a thought for everyone else.

The United States killed the leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in a drone strike this weekend in Kabul. I already kind of miss him. Zawahiri came from an older generation of jihadists—he was 71—and was in many ways the kind of terrorist one wants. For a decade or more he had no known good ideas. He told young upstarts to shelve their own good ideas, and never got around to them. He was a black hole of charisma. Whenever the Islamic State, which eventually defied him and broke off from Zawahiri’s Al Qaida, announced a new video, I got a queasy feeling and hoped I would not see anything that would haunt my dreams. When Zawahiri announced a new video, my Pavlovian reaction was narcoleptic. He was human melatonin. If the Islamic State’s spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani was a long huff of meth, Zawahiri was a cup of ovaltine.

He was also a creep and murderer. Thousands of people are dead because of him. If anyone deserved to be julienned by a Cuisinart blade dropped from the heavens by the CIA, it was Zawahiri. An Egyptian, he came of age politically around the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Egypt imprisoned every Islamist it could find, and Zawahiri spent years in state prisons, where he was tortured. Years later, in Tahrir Square during the revolution of 2011, I met men who said they had known him in prison. They said they hoped their old friend was well but had not kept up the relationship; a few years in Egypt’s state security prisons was plenty. They had given up violence. One became a math teacher and raised a family. Zawahiri, who trained as a surgeon and came from a prosperous family, could have left the path of death, but he was incorrigible. Out of prison, he spent part of the 1990s encouraging jihad in the Caucasus, and part of it spreading death at home. In 1997, his followers hacked and shot to death 58 tourists and four Egyptians in Luxor. Eventually Egyptians lost patience with him, and he followed Osama Bin Laden to Pakistan and Afghanistan—where it appears he remained until the CIA found him.

By all indications, Zawahiri got cocky. When the Taliban ruled Kabul in the late 1990s, Bin Laden and Zawahiri could live fairly openly. Zawahiri might have suspected that those old days had returned, and that the Taliban’s agreement with the United States, signed in Doha, Qatar, last year, would secure Afghanistan’s sovereignty and allow an honored hero like him to live openly again. The Taliban are already grousing on Twitter about violations of the Doha agreement. But the Taliban promised at Doha not to host terrorists, so they have little standing to complain about the killing of the world’s most famous terrorist in their capital.

Zawahiri’s replacement will be younger and more energetic than the old doctor. I wish that younger man a short and skittish life. But the truth is that Zawahiri’s killing probably will not have much effect on global terrorism, because the younger jihadist generation has already ceased to regard him as a leader, spiritual or otherwise. Zawahiri’s crowning achievement, the September 11 attacks, turned out to be a one-off, and its plotters spent most of the rest of their lives on the run, or bored senseless in Guantanamo Bay. The jihadist movement that achieved something new was the Islamic State—which ridiculed Zawahiri, called him a goofball and a geezer, and set out on a path of wanton destruction against his orders. It mocked him for his deference to the Taliban and for swearing allegiance to its founder, Mullah Omar, who turned out to have been dead for years. Many of the possible successors to Zawahiri have already split off into other jihadist groups, and have long been trying to bring about carnage and a terrestrial paradise without Al Qaida’s consent. They certainly will not seek the consent of his successor.

More interesting, I suspect, will be the attitude of the Taliban. They thought they had a country of their own, and that they would be left alone to rebuild it. They want money, and they want food for their starving people. But their critics have said they are little more than terrorists themselves, and that anyone who claims they have softened in the last 20 years has been taken in. The presence of Zawahiri in Kabul will be used as evidence that the Taliban deserve to be treated like terrorists in perpetuity. They could not resist turning their capital into an Al Qaida clubhouse for even a few months. Unless it turns out that the Taliban ratted out Zawahiri themselves—I doubt it—the presence of Zawahiri will instead make the group look incapable of change, and deserving of all the skepticism it got. And that will mean a long hungry winter ahead for Afghanistan.