According to Xinhua News Agency, Afghan Taliban supreme leader Ahunzada recently attended the Grand Loya Jirga of Afghanistan and delivered a speech calling on overseas Afghan businessmen to return to invest in their country.

In a taped speech broadcast by local Afghan media, Ahunzada said that since foreign aid is not able to rebuild Afghanistan's economy, he hoped that Afghan businessmen abroad would return to invest in construction.

Professor Zhu Yongbiao, director of Centre for Afghan Studies at Lanzhou University, told China Business News that the Taliban had in fact called on overseas Afghan businessmen to invest in their country before, but this time it was reiterated by the top Taliban leader.

Professor Zhu Yongbiao said that the call for overseas Afghans to invest in Afghanistan is in the hope that Afghans will solve Afghanistan's problems, and at the same time, he hopes to use this opportunity to pry the international community to invest in Afghanistan and inject funds.

Professor Zhu Yongbiao told China Business News that after coming to power, the Taliban, while stating that they were capable of solving their own domestic problems and emphasizing their autonomous independence, did not refuse, or even welcome, international assistance to Afghanistan.

However, Professor Zhu Yongbiao also told China Business News that the Taliban might have overly high expectations of overseas Afghan businessmen, and the amount of money that overseas Afghans can bring back to Afghanistan is actually not much, which is very limited to the overall economy of Afghanistan and the blood-making function of the economy.

Last year to date, the flow of foreign investment to Afghanistan has been very limited. Professor Zhu Yongbiao said to the first financial reporter, currently limited to individual countries and individual enterprises, Taliban investment has not made substantial progress, "most foreign enterprises still maintain a wait-and-see attitude, even if there are individual enterprises, many are also in a speculative mindset, long-term investment is very few". Moreover, Afghanistan's severely underdeveloped infrastructure is also considered to be an important factor affecting its ability to attract foreign investment. Due to more than 40 years of continuous war and turmoil, Afghanistan's infrastructure is very poor. In addition to being at the bottom of the world in terms of road mileage, etc., it is also at the bottom in terms of railways and electricity per capita.

Professor Zhu Yongbiao concluded that what the Taliban needed most was "quick money" to solve their immediate financial difficulties and alleviate their immediate needs, as opposed to long-term investment. At the same time, he also analyzed the Taliban's desire to attract investment from Afghans abroad for political reasons, as well as economic ones.