SOME people will claim it is tragedy enough that we are sending our service personnel into frontline action many thousands of miles away in Afghanistan, in a war that has arguably very little to do with the UK, and which Allied forces anyway have zero chance of winning.

But how much more reprehensible does it seem today, following revelations that soldiers are dying on the ground because their equipment is woefully inadequate? Coroner David Masters ruled yesterday that four soldiers who died in Afghanistan – including two from our own region – had been let down by failings in their training and in their kit supplies.

Whatever anyone feels about the legitimacy or otherwise of Western involvement in the conflict, the least we could possibly expect is that the personnel sent out to assist in defeating the Taliban are provided with the proper resources to do the job.

The inquest into the deaths of the four soldiers – among them Burscough- born Corporal Sarah Bryant and Trooper Paul Stout, from Woolton, Liverpool – who were killed in a roadside bomb blast in 2008, heard that their commander had requested a replacement for their Snatch Land Rover, in favour of something with more protection for such a volatile area, but his plea was denied because of equipment shortages.

Amid the mounting toll of casualties in the Afghan campaign, we feel compelled to ask how many deaths could have been prevented, if only the proper funding had been in place.

Wherever cuts are made, in the Treasury’s efforts to reduce Britain’s mountainous budget deficit, who could argue against the Armed Forces being exempt from the kind of savings that might actually cost lives.

Whatever lessons are learned from the ongoing Iraq Inquiry, we hope and trust that measures to support our forces in Afghanistan are put in place as swiftly as humanly possible.