After intervention by the Bush administration, an American judge last month dismissed a lawsuit by a German Muslim who was seeking to sue the CIA for allegedly kidnapping him to Afghanistan and torturing him by mistake.

Sitting in a district court in Virginia, where the CIA has its headquarters, T S Ellis, the judge, said he was satisfied after receiving a secret written briefing from the director of central intelligence that allowing the lawsuit to proceed would harm national security. In times of war, he said, the plaintiff’s “private interests must give way to the national interest in preserving state secrets”.

When I heard this I recalled writing cold war speeches for President Ronald Reagan and much of his cabinet, imagining the outrage in America had the same verdict been leaked from a court in the Soviet Union.

What would the Reagan White House have said had some Russian apparatchik decreed that an innocent victim of torture deserved neither a hearing nor redress? Two decades ago the cold war definitions were clear: the West was a pluralistic coalition of nations big and small. We stood four-square against a cruel superpower willing to torture, kidnap, slaughter and invade in order to install an ideologically driven, once-size-fits-all system claiming historical inevitability.

Today, brandishing ideologies that appeal to domestic political audiences and intimidate everyone else, American and British leaders sound like Leonid Brezhnev. A current Afghan joke asks the difference between Americans and Russians, and the bitter answer is: “The Americans are better paid.”

By the standards of Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, our neoconservatives are not conservative, they are neosoviet. In the process, George Bush and Tony Blair are losing the so-called war on terror. Their policies backfire and play into the hands of Osama Bin Laden.

Islamist militants have captured Mogadishu from warlords who were unbeatable until America started backing them. In Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, extremist religious parties that never polled more than 4% before 9/11 now hold an iron-clad majority. Vicious riots against the Americans in Kabul suggest that we are no longer welcome even there.

Recently, over rich Afghan ravioli called mantu, a former mujaheddin commander warned me about what was happening. I have been both a relief worker and a writer in Afghanistan, and I have known him almost 20 years. He is now a lawmaker in the new national assembly and as committed to democracy as ever.

“You will lose two wars through the same mistake,” he said. “In our civil war with the northerners, there were only three kinds of Pashtun people who had no dealings with the Taliban — the hopelessly stupid, a handful of western liberals who mostly emigrated, or people too foul to be allowed even into the Taliban.

“By banning even moderate Talibs from government, you excluded the only people who could have brought the majority of Pashtuns into the coalition. Instead you made (President) Hamid Karzai pick his governors from the worst kinds of thieves and killers, serial pederasts and pimps — the very people that the Taliban were initially adored for toppling.”

We did the same in Iraq, I noted, banning Ba’athists when most had joined Iraq’s only party merely to get their children into good schools. “This problem may be too late to fix,” he said sadly.

Our political leaders oversimplified the political situations in Iraq and Afghanistan to justify their incursions there. Had they told their people the truth — that there were better and worse Ba’athists and Taliban, some of whom were needed as allies — it would have ruined the false clarity of pure good versus pure evil so essential to their rhetoric.

In the process they have alienated Muslim moderates, both at home and abroad, without whose help the war on terror cannot be won. Last year polls showed that eight out of 10 British Muslims believed their government was waging active war against Islam.