The Strike That Killed al-Qaida’s Ayman al-Zawahiri Is a Bigger Deal Than It Sounds Like

President Joe Biden’s surprise announcement Monday night—that a U.S. drone strike over the weekend killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of al-Qaida and co-architect of the 9/11 terrorist attack—is both more and less significant than it might seem at first glance.
On the one hand, mainly because of the West’s counter-terrorism strategies, al-Qaida is far from the potent global force that it was a decade ago. Its presence has been muted, and Zawahiri himself has hidden so far out of sight that one prominent expert speculated back in November that he might have been killed...