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Basharat Peer in New Delhi
He is a former Kabul police officer, but doesn't have enough money to buy a television to see the destruction rained upon his country by the United States jets.
Tahir Ahmad came to India as a refugee, and the newspaper pictures of his pot holed country he looks at remind him of the roads that will have to be repaired, the houses that will have to be rebuilt.
He thinks about the fellow Afghans who are almost starving and need food, shelter and medicines.
"It seems that Americans will win the war and they will dislodge the Taleban. But this time they should not leave Afghans to die of starvation, or live in the devastation that Afghanistan would be, after the war is over," Tahir Ahmad said.
"This time the Americans should help us rebuild Afghanistan. But you cannot be sure of that. They may forget us again like they did after the collapse of Soviet Union," he added as he scanned a newspaper for daily astrological predictions.
His life and the experiences it has given him have made him a firm believer in astro-predictions and he charts his day accordingly.
Not so proficient in English, Ahmad uses a dictionary to read the papers and notes down the pleasant predictions in a notebook in Persian.
He is waiting for a prediction of his return to Afghanistan.
Many Afghan refugees in Delhi vividly remember the days of infighting and poverty that followed the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. They have not forgotten how the Afghans fought America's proxy war against the Russians, and were forgotten by America.
In fact, the food droppings by the Americans haven't gone down well with many refugees.
"The Americans are dropping food packets along with bombs. It is like saying: 'We will feed you and then kill you'," said Burhaan Javed, a young refugee in Delhi.
The American strategy to drop food packets saying 'Gift from America' during its military strikes on Afghanistan has also come under criticism from the humanitarian workers.
The strategy was aimed at sending across the message that the American war is against terrorism, not against people of Afghanistan and Islam.
But the aid workers believe that combining political and military strategy with humanitarian aid negatively affects the humanitarian relief work.
"We fear that air drops of food by the US military, even if well-intentioned, are not the most effective means of meeting the enormous humanitarian needs of the Afghan people," the international medical aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières said.
It believes that blurring of lines between military and aid activities has the potential to undermine the provision of larger-scale humanitarian assistance by independent, non-governmental actors.
The approaching Afghan winter has also been giving the jitters to aid workers, as the dire humanitarian situation that Afghanistan has been in throughout the year will only worsen.
"Untargeted and unmonitored relief is generally ineffective and can be potentially harmful. The medicines need to be delivered through health structures and administered by qualified health staff if they are to be effective, and not risk causing more harm than good,'' the Medicines Sans Frontieres argued.
But once the war drums fall silent on the battlefront, the most pressing task is going to be the reconstruction of Afghanistan under a stable government, representing the multi-ethnic Afghan society.
The United Nations estimates that one in four Afghans is on the brink of starvation, and the average life expectancy is 47 years.
"You cannot make a list of what Afghanistan needs after the war is over. It needs everything," said Fahmeeda Ahmad, who once studied History and Philosophy in a Kabul college.
Her children, like many others, do not believe that once upon a time life was normal in Afghanistan.
"I used to go to a college and get a scholarship. We too had proper governance and the good things in life. But when I tell my kids, they don't believe me," Ahmad said.
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