Biden also took the drone strike as vindication of his troop-withdrawal from Afghanistan. He said at the time that, even without troops on the ground, the U.S. could prevent al-Qaida and other terrorist groups from using the country as a safe haven. This weekend, the U.S. took one step toward doing just that.

At the same time, it is worrisome that Zawahiri was given safe haven to begin with. Bruce Riedel, a former CIA terrorism analyst now at the Brookings Institution, said in an email Monday, “It is very disturbing but not surprising that he was hiding in a house owned by the Taliban.” Zawahiri had longtime connections with the Haqqani network, a jihadist group with strong ties to Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI. “This raises serious questions,” Riedel said, “about what the ISI is doing with al-Qaida” and about what both might be doing with the Taliban.

By authorizing this weekend’s attack, Biden may have weakened those alliances and slowed down whatever they might have been plotting, but it’s unlikely that he shut them down altogether.