If it is true, as we have been told, that an American drone managed to kill Zawahiri on Sunday without any collateral civilian casualties, not even Zawahiri’s family, then that is more impressive still.

But in other ways the news was underwhelming. In total it has taken America’s intelligence agencies almost a quarter of a century to find the man behind the African embassy bombings. As a trailer for the world’s worst film might say, they were in a race against time: who would get Zawahiri first — American intelligence or old age?

Fortunately it was the Americans. But as often with these hubristic moments, the success did not last. It soon transpired that the Americans had located Zawahiri because he had been visiting his family, and that the house in Kabul in which he was staying was just feet away from the American and British embassies.

It was pretty insulting when, after a decade of tearing up the earth in pursuit of Osama bin Laden, he turned out to be living safely in the territory of our “ally” Pakistan. Zawahiri, by contrast, was visiting family in a country which the US and her allies handed back to the Taliban only just under a year ago. The best impetus for the US invasion of Afghanistan twenty-one years ago was to prevent Afghanistan being a safe haven for terrorists. But after two decades of failing to govern or secure the country, the Biden administration handed it back to the same people they had tried to liberate it from twenty years earlier.