Contractor Casualties

Among the American deaths in the Afghanistan war in 2011 were 430 employees of American contractors, The New York Times reported on Sunday. That’s more than the 418 U.S. troops who died the same year.

The deceased contractors included 386 working for the Defense Department, 43 for the U.S. Agency for International Development and one from the State Department, according to sources at the American embassy in Kabul and public data.

“Even the dying is being outsourced here,” began the dispatch by Rod Nordland datelined Kabul. For every contractor killed, many more are seriously wounded, he reported. The Labor Department counted 1,777 American contractors injured seriously enough to miss four days of work in 2011.