What was Al Zawahiri doing in Kabul?

The most timely article of the day was written by Marc Thiessen of the American Enterprise Institute in The Washington Post, the newspaper of the resoundingly eloquent obituaries:

As could not be otherwise, Thiessen, former head of the team that wrote speeches for President George W. Bush, congratulates himself that "a murderous terrorist with the blood on his hands of thousands of Americans has been removed from the face of the Earth" and congratulates Joe Biden for having authorized the air strike that killed the Al Qaeda leader this weekend. But it turns out that "Biden's greatest foreign policy triumph" inescapably refers to his "greatest foreign policy disgrace": the shameful withdrawal from Afghanistan.

It was precisely in Afghanistan that Ayman al-Zawahiri lived. And "not in some remote cave in the Hindu Kush mountains but in the very heart of Afghanistan's Taliban-controlled capital," writes Thiessen, not without first pointing out that last year, on the occasion of the ominous withdrawal, Biden claimed that Al Qaeda was no longer in the country, while Secretary of State Blinken claimed that only "remnants" of the organization founded by Bin Laden remained and that they did not pose the slightest danger to the United States.

What was Zawahiri up to, why was he stirring up anti-American terrorism?, Thiessen asks in his must-read article. "Unfortunately, we might never know," he answers right away, only to return again to the August 2021 withdrawal:

In closing, Thiessen says the lesson of this episode is clear, "Al Qaeda is back in Afghanistan," and, just as he credits Biden for the elimination of their leader, he also blames him for "creating the conditions that allowed the world's most wanted terrorist to move to downtown Kabul and set up operations in a city that had been liberated from Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies with the blood of courageous American service members."