First, congratulations to President Biden on bringing al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri to justice.

It may have taken 21 years to get him since the evil terrorist dubbed “bin Laden’s brains” masterminded the 9/11 attacks. But better late than never.

For more than three decades, Zawahiri plotted the murder of thousands of Americans in a series of atrocities and was just as dangerous as his more infamous boss, whom he replaced after bin Laden was killed in 2011.

So I’m thrilled he’s dead, appropriately chopped to pieces by Hellfire R9X missiles fired from an unmanned Predator drone. These so-called “ninja bombs” don’t have warheads, instead deploying six blades that fly at high speed, with extraordinary precision, and literally slice and dice their target.

I can’t think of a better way for a sadistic bastard like Zawahiri to die.

Nor can I think of a better place to be when it happened than New York City, which coincidentally is where I also was when the bin Laden news broke.

From the various conversations I’ve had today, New Yorkers feel a collective visceral need for these moments of vengeance and accountability for the 9/11 barbarism. 

And I’m sure most share my view that Biden deserves great credit for ordering the successful strike, which is a major victory for the US in the ongoing war on terror.

But before he goes on too ecstatic a victory lap, I have one urgent question for the president: What the hell was Zawahiri doing casually standing on the balcony of a downtown residential house in Afghanistan’s capital city of Kabul?

It’s been widely reported that it was an al Qaeda “safe house,” though this turned out to be a somewhat overly optimistic description.

Yet after Biden’s disastrous overnight withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer, betraying the people there — including allies — to the Taliban wolves, the president assured us that al Qaeda was “gone” from the country.

“Let’s put this thing in perspective,” he said, “what interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point with al Qaeda gone? We went to Afghanistan for the express purpose of getting rid of al Qaeda in Afghanistan … And we did.”

Turns out he didn’t.

In fact, al Qaeda’s No. 1 terrorist swiftly moved into Kabul with his family, just a few months after Biden’s ill-advised and woefully inaccurate boast.

The brazen impunity of this move is disconcerting enough, but far more worrying are the disturbing questions it raises.

There is a not a snowball in hell’s chance that Zawahiri would have done this without the knowledge and explicit support of Taliban chiefs.

As Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, this constitutes a “gross violation” of the Taliban’s commitment in the Doha agreement made after the US withdrawal that they would not provide safe harbor to al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Biden said yesterday that in recent weeks, Zawahiri had been making videos “calling for his followers to attack the United States and our allies.”

Incredibly, this means the leader of al Qaeda was actively plotting further terror attacks from inside Kabul, and the Taliban knew it.

Of course, this makes an absolute mockery of Biden’s claim that al Qaeda was “gone” from Afghanistan.

But if the Taliban allowed Zawahiri to do this, how many more al Qaeda operatives are back in Afghanistan right now, also planning to murder Americans and their allies?

The whole point of the 20-year war that followed 9/11 was precisely to stop al Qaeda using Afghanistan as a base to plan more such attacks.

Biden’s sudden, catastrophic withdrawal from the country a year ago, without leaving even a small force on the ground to keep order, was widely condemned at the time for being a staggeringly reckless act that would haunt America.

Now those cowardly chickens have come home to roost in shocking fashion.

The gleeful Taliban took the country back in just a few weeks and as a result, Afghanistan is now a failed state ravaged by a crumbling economy, extreme poverty, and a brutal new oppression of the Afghan people, especially women, who’ve been sent right back to the Dark Ages.

All hopes of a new, reformed, different, “nicer, wiser” Taliban were as bogus as many of us feared at the time.

And predictably, all the promises the Taliban made in the Doha agreement about not protecting terrorists have turned out to be a disingenuous load of old claptrap too.

The Taliban haven’t changed, nor has al Qaeda.

Both hate America and everything it stands for, and given the chance, will kill as many Americans as they can.

The fact that Zawahiri was able to plan new attacks from Kabul tells you all you need to know about the real damage caused by Biden’s appalling abandonment of Afghanistan.

He didn’t just surrender the country to a bunch of medieval monsters, he gave the green light to al Qaeda to return to the place they plotted 9/11.

So yes, congratulations on killing Zawahiri, Mr. President.

The world is indisputably a better place without that despicable scumbag in it.

But let’s be under no illusion: The fact the world’s most wanted man was back in the heart of Afghanistan, devising new ways to kill Americans, is a monumental failure.

And the buck for that failure stops with you, Joe Biden, the man who waved the white flag a year ago and has now exposed the US to a potential whole new world of pain and bloodshed at the hands of the very same terrorists who brought down the Twin Towers in 2001.