An article published Wednesday by ProPublica examines a recent Congressional Research Service (CRS) report on the government's insurance coverage of overseas contractors. Known as the Defense Base Act (DBA), the program is also the only tool for the government to keep track of contractor deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. As ProPublica notes, the number of contractor deaths over the last six months is staggering, but, because DBA chronically undercounts fatalities, the true total is unknown.

Since the Afghanistan war began in 2001, the U.S. government has counted 289 civilians killed. Of those, 100 have died within the last six months. This is a direct consequence of President Obama's decision to escalate the U.S. troop presence in the country. With more troops come more contractors; contractors outnumber military personnel 1.37:1. The U.S. troop escalation has also brought about more violence in Afghanistan, making causalities among the 107,000 U.S.-hired contractors more likely.

The problem is that the American public is unaware of these deaths. The government does not include contractor fatalities in its fatality totals. If the government did include them, the death toll in Afghanistan would have already surpassed 1,000: 848 soldiers, 289 civilian contractors.

Of course, the war in Afghanistan would have reached the 1,000-death milestone quite a bit earlier because the 289 figure is not reliable. The Labor Department, which the DBA tasks to keep count of overseas contractor fatalities, does a horrible job of keeping track, even according to their own officials. As mentioned above, contractor deaths are routinely underreported.

The problem with not keeping an accurate count of contractor fatalities or reporting it to the public, as ProPublica observes, is that it disguises "the full human cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan." Without better transparency and accountability on tracking contractor deaths, the American public will never fully understand our involvement in either the Afghanistan or Iraq wars.

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