Groups of girls and boys, some barefoot, all in threadbare cottons, form lines in the scorching sun, glancing nervously at their teacher as they sing. Their faces are grave and strained, as though everything depends on their performance.

Mohammed Rakhmoni, a 52-year-old teacher who is now headteacher of the improvised desert school, smiles approvingly. His lined and weathered face and broken teeth are those of a man 20 years his senior.

“The children must learn, or they will have no future at all,” he says. “They will always be trapped, as we are trapped now. But as teachers, we have to think of the day when we’ll be free to live normally again.”

The children are part of a group of 1,500 displaced Afghans sentenced to endure the strip of wasteland between the Taliban troops who forced them from their village a year ago, and the Tajik and Russian border guards who keep them from crossing into destitute Tajikistan.

A kilometre to the south, the guns of the Taliban forces echo into the night, reminding the Afghans of why they are here. What Rakhmoni does not say is that the boys who sit in front of him each day - those whose sharp soprano voices have turned to hoarse tenors - are also students in the school of war.

Ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks, who make up about one-third of Afghanistan’s population, have already known brutal ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Pashtun Taliban. Some, barely old enough to grow beards, will join the opposition Northern Alliance and fight.

“Yes there are some guns here,” Rakhmoni admits. “But we have no way of defending ourselves. Who, after all, cares about our safety?” As Afghanistan’s latest war draws on into winter, it seems inevitable that many of the boys from the settlement will be sucked in.

One in four of the country’s children dies before the age of five: those who survive are as hardy as the wisps of dry marsh grass that spring up determinedly through the rocks.

Rakhmoni labours against the odds to teach his pupils the three Rs, crouching in a low-roofed classroom the refugees have patched together from sun-baked mud.

Even before this war, Afghanistan’s adult literacy rate was 46 per cent for men and 16 per cent for women.

Only 32 per cent of boys and 11 per cent of girls finished primary school. Propaganda leaflets and the instructions on aid packages - dropped from US planes - impress few people as most cannot read them.

Conflict has robbed the country of skilled teachers, and those still working are often volunteers, like 21-year-old Haroon Nazari.

“The Taliban are illiterate, violent and fanatical,” says the barefoot doctor and educator. “If the United States can bring them down it would be doing everyone in the country a favour.”

Just over a year ago, Nazari was forced to leave Kabul, where he ran a martial arts school in defiance of the Taliban. Now, in the absence of textbooks, he passes around his most precious possession, a neatly-written diary of his anger and resistance.

Like teachers in the religiously-based madrassas that replaced secular schools when the Taliban took power in the mid-1990s, Nazari educates the children in his own version of right and wrong.

In much of Afghanistan, the education that remains often reinforces the isolation and hostility of its ethnic and religious groups. In a country where more than 50 per cent of children are stunted by malnutrition, young minds are also starved.

They have little chance to rise above their dire conditions and understand the world at large. The outlook for them, and for the society they will inherit, is grim.

In the refugee settlement, the children’s concert is coming to an end: “My motherland you are my pride,” they sing into the hot, dust-coloured emptiness. “Now I’m ready to give my soul for you.”