George Bush is gone, Binyam Mohamed is home from Guantánamo, and the War on Terror is no more. Rejoice. It was all a bad dream.

Should even a fraction of Mr Mohamed's story of physical and psychological abuse in various prisons from Morocco to Afghanistan turn out to be true, he has been appallingly treated. His activist lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, is quoted as saying that Mr Mohamed was “a victim who has suffered more than any human being should ever suffer”.

Of course, it would be easier to demand that security heads should roll if we knew that Mr Mohamed had been wrongfully detained in the first place and that he was not, and had never been, a jihadi. I have longed to have this question put directly to Mr Stafford Smith in one of his hundreds of interviews, but in vain. He did once tell an interviewer that his hypothesis was that the detainees “actually didn't do much of anything down in Afghanistan or they were aid workers, humanitarian people...”

Mr Mohamed's story is that, as a young Ethiopian denied asylum in Britain but permitted to remain, he led an unsatisfactory life and became a drug addict. In June 2001, in an effort to kick the habit, he went first to Pakistan, then to Taleban-ruled Afghanistan, where he thought he'd take a look at how Islamic rule was working out. In April 2002 he was arrested in Pakistan, attempting to return to Britain.

The US alleges, partly as a result of Mr Mohamed's own confessions (he claims, made under duress), that he had attended an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, and had been plotting a Richard Reid-type attack in the West. But no charges have been, or will be, brought.

I can't honestly say that I believe Mr Mohamed's account, partly because it was a long way to travel for drug rehab, and partly because it reminds me of the case of the Tipton Three, whose odd journey through the Afghan war to American prison was supposedly chronicled in Michael Winterbottom's 2006 film, The Road to Guantánamo.

In that movie the three young men were depicted travelling to Pakistan for a wedding, getting bored, becoming part of a humanitarian relief column to Afghanistan, sitting around Kabul eating naan bread, taking the wrong taxi and ending up in a war zone. I noted at the time that the film had obscured both the timeline and the nature of the places visited by the Tipton boys, but still had to agree that their story could be true. Wrong. A year later one admitted to Channel 4 that they had indeed had weapons training in a jihadi camp. The humanitarian, accidental stuff was lies.

Nor is it the case that everyone held at Guantánamo could either be charged or was guiltless. Three weeks ago two former inmates turned up as senior al-Qaeda figures in Yemen, one of whom had subsequently been involved in bombing a US embassy.

I make this point because, in my view, Guantánamo was wrong despite there being a real problem of terrorism, and not because that threat was overblown by George Bush and his evil neocon advisers.

But the war is over. Yesterday, shortly before Mr Mohamed landed in Britain, I listened to one of those fashionable voices that calls for more understanding of political Islamism and less confrontation. The former MI6 agent Alastair Crooke, who has become a kind of Dr Dolittle of Islamist movements, was discussing his new book, Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution with Andrew Marr.

Crooke's point seemed to be that we in the West could learn a lot from Islamism, since it was, in some ways, morally superior to our fly-blown, materialist, individualist societies. Islamism, as practised by Hezbollah, Hamas and President Ahmadinejad, was saying something profound “about the essence of man”. He went on: “It is not just about violence or a whimsical reaction to modernity, it is a new way of seeing our existence...”

Islamists wanted “a society based on compassion and justice”.

Sure, Marr said, but what about the position of women, persecution of gays and the tendency towards blowing stuff up. “There is a part that is dangerous and ugly,” Crooke agreed, before adding, bewilderingly, “but that is largely something the West has created itself.”

Then a piece of apologia that would have impressed any old Communist: “There are many mistakes... the Iranians would admit this isn't the finished article.”

I believe that, as a matter of pragmatism, it will be necessary to enter into a dialogue with the likes of Hamas and the Iranian Government, but Crooke's failure to see that a theocracy is very unlikely to lead to a world of “compassion and justice” is stunning. The institutionalised inequality of women, backwardness and sexual hypocrisy that it entails is no accident, it is intrinsic. So is the disqualification of “ungodly” candidates and the persecution of apostates. Since God declines actually to come among us and make his wishes clear, it must be left to a council of bearded clerics to tell us what he wants. And once they do...

All theocracies are coercive, as are most Islamist movements, and where they are not (as in Turkey) it is because they have been forced to change. Crooke's Hamas and Hezbollah are still the organisations that pour out hour after hour of poisonous anti-Jew racism on their TV channels, and have a rough way with dissent in their own areas.

In the Pakistani region of Swat, whence the Akond has long fled, the local Taleban were blowing up schools, attacking schoolgirls with acid, murdering journalists and assassinating human-rights activists.

On November 26 Bakht Zeba was dragged from her home, flogged and shot dead for the crime of criticism. Last week the Pakistani authorities reached a ceasefire with the insurgents, part of which is to agree that girls will no longer have the right to go to school in Swat. Where are the student occupiers and the calls for sanctions?

And lest we thought that the problem would stay in the valley, yesterday, as Binyam Mohamed came home to Britain damaged but alive, the body of a 17-year-old French girl was being flown to Paris from Cairo, where she had died in a bomb attack.

But there is no more War on Terror. Except, as my friend Professor Norman Geras has been pointing out, Barack Obama has found phrases that mean exactly the same thing, such as this from the inauguration: “Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.”

Or this: “The United States intends to prosecute the ongoing struggle against violence and terrorism...” Professor Geras calls it “the struggle formerly known as the War on Terror”.

So Binyam may be back, Barack may be in the White House, but the truth is that the problem remains.

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