Readers of this newspaper letters page -- or indeed just about any letters page: the man's pen seems to be just about as indefatigable as it is unpleasant -- will not be surprised to see the name of Tom Cooper, of Knocklyon, in the centre of a debate which has managed in equal measure to be unseemly, ungracious and ungenerous.

It focused on whether it could be appropriately said that Lt Paddy Bury, from Wicklow -- who has been filing first-class dispatches in the 'Irish Times' from Afghanistan where he is serving with the Royal Irish Regiment -- could properly be described as an Irish soldier. He is, goes the Cooperine argument, serving with the British army, so how could he be called an Irish soldier?

These exacting terminological niceties, and the deeply entrenched narrowness which underlies them, clearly can and will survive a legion of Good Friday Agreements, never mind the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone.

But any temptation I might have had to enter the debate (which was never the most compelling of my life) was cut short by the tragic death of Ranger Justin Cupples, RIR, RIP.

What was Justin? He was an American, because he was born in the US. He was Irish, in that his family is Irish, he regarded himself as Irish, and his home was in Cavan when he joined the British army.

He was certainly a British soldier, and had sworn an oath of loyalty to the queen. So everyone can either claim him or disown him, as they choose. But whatever his nationality, it cannot be denied that he was a soldier of conviction: he was serving in Afghanistan because he felt the historic need to confront and contain the Islamicist forces there.

That was one reason why he joined the British army rather than the Army of this Republic. And maybe there was a family connection. Another Irishman with that unusual name, Captain W Cupples, aged 20, (they grew up young back then) Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, attached Royal Irish Rifles, (two regiments which are represented within today's Royal Irish) died of his wounds in Ypres, this month, 93 years ago.

Call him what you will: Irish, British, American, even mercenary -- Justin Cupples was fighting a just war in a just cause, with all the legal and moral authorisation, including that of the UN and the government of Afghanistan, that it is possible to find. If we needed confirmation of the rightness of the cause in which he laid down his young life, it came in the almost simultaneous conclusion of a trial of Islamicist terrorists in Britain who planned to massacre thousands of transatlantic passengers.

For there are thousands of other Britons, of immigrant stock, who support jihadism across the world, and who would rejoice at the ejection of UN forces for Afghanistan as another step on the path to victory.

Victory? What is that victory for these extremists? Ultimately, the forcible Islamicisation of the entire world. And from the West's point of view, faint-hearts might witter that Afghanistan is not a winnable war. Yes indeed -- but more to the point, it is certainly a losable war: and if there is one thing far worse than not winning a war, by God, it is losing one, and most especially to a sworn, determined and fearless enemy.

THESE people are not Vietcong, whose conquests stop on the roof of the US embassy. And the reason we need to be determined and hard and unyielding in response was inadvertently provided by a 'moderate', 'British' Muslim who was asked on ITV why these terrorists wanted to kill so many unbelievers.

The answer was simple, said this fine fellow: British foreign policy towards Afghanistan, Iraq, Kashmir, Chechnya. I see. So that all that any western government has to do to ensure that terrorist members of its Muslim minority do not massacre their fellow citizens is to follow Islamic instructions on that government's foreign policy: is that it?

And is that democracy?

Oh, and which faction of Islam are we to follow to avoid mass murder on our streets or in our air lanes? Shia? Sunni? Wahhabi? Wannabe?

Silly, fey, liberal idiots will say that we should abandon Afghanistan. Well, if we do, then watch the cards fall: from the Himalayas, to the straits of Hercules dividing Africa from Europe, to the emerging Islamic townships of Benelux and the UK: and within the malign continuum of extremism, they do not ask whether a soldier of Islam is from 'Afghanistan' or 'Bengalistan', 'Antwerpistan', 'Bradfordistan' or even one day, for sure, 'Dublinistan'. They ask only if he is true to the cause.

Do you care about this? To judge from my emails and letters, you clearly don't. So be it. Instead we have fools arguing whether or not a soldier on patrol is Irish or not. You might as usefully ask whether he is homosexual.

There is a difference, of course. In the Islamicist extremists' ideal world, the captured kaffir soldier, Irish or otherwise, would have his throat cut: the homosexual would be slowly stoned to death.

kmyers@independent.ie

- Kevin Myers