Sitting upright in his white vest Hashmatullah, 19, has the sunburned torso and biceps of a gymnast. But, horribly, he has little else.
A mine blew away everything below his hips when he was walking down a track near Charikar, a town north of Kabul that saw heavy fighting between Afghan tribal leaders and the country's rulers at the time, the Taleban.
"I am ashamed to beg. I hate to beg," he says, staring dully at the ground to avoid eye contact. He sits for hours each day at an intersection opposite Kabul's Plaza Hotel.
Hashmatullah and an estimated 40,000 maimed Afghans are living reminders of the trauma his nation has suffered over nearly a quarter century of conflict.
Mines and unexploded ordnance have been part of impoverished Afghanistan's landscape since the 1979 Soviet invasion, the resistance to the occupation, the ensuing civil war, the advent of the fundamentalist Taleban and the US-led war to oust them.
The international community hopes the country's first direct presidential vote on Saturday will break the cycle of violence and piece a shattered society together again.
Several of the 17 rival candidates ranged against US-backed interim leader Hamid Karzai, who is a clear favourite, led resistance to the Soviet occupation.
The United States co-opted support from these so-called warlords to help vanquish the Taleban in late 2001, and Karzai's interim government subsequently relied on their backing, but he has now moved to marginalise some of the bigger names.
While men with bloody pasts try to carve out a place in Afghanistan's political future, ruined bodies hauling themselves down Kabul's streets provide a mirror image of a shared history.
"Everybody in Afghanistan is in a way disabled, I understand that," says Alberto Cairo, Italian head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) orthopaedic centre in Kabul.
"But disability has to be tackled. These are vulnerable people."
In Kabul, it is hard to go anywhere without seeing amputees.
Near the British Embassy, someone has deposited a girl with no legs on the side of a major road to beg. They will come back and get her later.
Through the tears and dust in her eyes she has a close-up view of wheels rolling by. There is no sidewalk, no gutter. Otherwise she would be in it.
Many amputees beg in the busy downtown area near the Plaza Hotel. Those with crutches hobble along the street, those who can't walk hunch by the roadside.
Spread in front of Hashmatullah at his pitch near the Plaza is a square of cloth, with coins scattered on it and a stone acting as paperweight for a few afghani banknotes.
"My body itches and burns at night from the day spent begging under this blistering sun," he said.
Hashmatullah can vote on Saturday. But he won't bother.
"I couldn't wait in the long queues to register in my condition. And there is no one worth voting for.
"I want a government that will boost the economy, and work for the poor and improve the conditions of invalids. Someone who will provide education and training for people like me."
On the sidewalk, two more invalids shoo away beggar women in blue burqas, who have interrupted them in telling their stories.
Faiza Mohammed has one leg, a wife and two children. He guesses he is over 30, but looks older.
He stepped on a mine loading ammunition on a truck while fighting against the Taleban in the mid-1990s.
"I have no property and no business; begging is all I can do. I make about 50 to 100 afghanis (one to two dollars) a day."
Mir Gul is 23 and lost his leg collecting firewood.
They both want the government to provide jobs.
And for all their hardship, they exhibit some kind of hope in the future - they've registered to vote.
Karzai is in luck, even though he is an ethnic Pashtun, and they are Tajiks.
"I will vote for Karzai. He is sympathetic," says Mir Gul.
Sympathetic maybe, but his interim government cannot claim much credit, health experts say. Neither the Ministry of Martyrs and Disabled or the Ministry of Public Health has made a priority of looking after the maimed.
The ICRC gave Mir Gul and Mohammed their crutches.
"This is the place people come to get legs," says Cairo, walking through workshops manned by disabled workers making prosthetic limbs.
"It is a sad place. You see shattered lives."
The ICRC runs six orthopaedic centres across Afghanistan. Of some 62,000 disabled patients registered since the project began in 1988, nearly 30,000 are amputees.
"Disability is not perceived as a priority. Everybody cries. But no one is taking concrete steps," says Cairo.
"In the field of physical rehabilitation we do a lot. What we do in terms of social reintegration is only a drop in a big sea."