Investors’ dilemma: Abandon billions or work with Taliban?

If investors walk away, Afghanistan faces economic collapse without the billions of dollars it gets in aid money.

As foreign governments, aid institutions and companies scramble to evacuate staff from Afghanistan, a crucial question is emerging: Should they engage with the ruling Taliban or abandon years of investment in the country and 38 million Afghans? The Taliban in the past week has pledged peaceful relations with other countries, women’s rights and independent media – but some former diplomats and academics say the hardline group of fighters, while more media and internet savvy than the Taliban of the 1990s, is just as brutal. The Taliban in the past barred women from work, girls from school and killed or disfigured dissenters in public. It also harboured al-Qaeda, which plotted the September 11, 2001, hijacked plane attacks on New York and Washington that prompted a US-led invasion.