Investors confused whether to leave billions of dollar or get into talks with Taliban

While foreign governments, aid agencies and companies are struggling to evacuate people from Afghanistan, an important question arises: should they get into talks with the ruling Taliban or abandon years of investment in the country and 38 million Afghans?

The Taliban has promised peaceful relations with other countries, women's rights and independent media over the past week - but some former diplomats and academics believe the uncompromising group of fighters, while more media and internet savvy than the Taliban of the 1990s, but is just as cruel.

The Taliban had earlier banned women from work, girls from school and publicly murdered or disfigured dissidents. It also includes al-Qaeda, which hijacked planes and did the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington that caused a US-led invasion.

For foreign aid organizations, the situation is "a paradox," says Robert Crews, a professor of history at Stanford University and author of the 2015 book, Afghan Modern: The History of a Global Nation.

"If you are a paramedic in a state hospital, you are serving a regime whose legitimacy is in the balance," he said. 'But if everyone goes home, will the state collapse?

Afghanistan's government budget is funded 70 to 80 percent by international donors, including the U.S. Agency for International Development, stated Michael McKinley, who served as ambassador to Afghanistan in 2015 and 2016. The country is facing economic collapse without the help.

"The Taliban will require significant outside funding, unless they return to what they did from 1996 to 2001, which essentially led the government to minimalist levels," said McKinley, now at the Cohen Group consultation. "Living off the drug trade will not given them a way to stay in power."

International failure to enter into talks with the Taliban could lead to an even bigger crisis, some warn. "There will be a massive temptation to just pull the plug and walk away, but we did it in 1989 and 9/11 happened 12 years later," said Daniel Runde, a development specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, stated.