When the Taliban seized power in August, the international aid that made up about 40% of its GDP evaporated. Taliban officials have now cast that as an opportunity.

“Afghanistan cannot rely on aid forever,” acting Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Salam Hanafi told a conference of diplomats and United Nations officials at the Presidential Palace in Kabul last month, where the Taliban spelled out its economic ideas for the first time, which included low taxes and light regulation.

“We need an indigenous, strong and dynamic economy that relies more on domestic capacity,“ he said. ”Our long-term goals are the economic self-sufficiency of the Afghan economy.”

The Taliban says it has eliminated the corruption that riddled the U.S.-backed government, and, with the war now over, two major obstacles for business have been removed. They are inviting international investment, particularly in the sectors that are seen as having the most immediate potential to drive economic activity—agriculture, mining and transit trade.

The Taliban has prepared the first national budget in 20 years that contains no foreign assistance, which had in recent years paid for 75% of public expenditures. They are collecting about as much in customs revenues as the U.S.-backed government and while trade is lower, less money is being siphoned off, the Taliban says. For the full year, the Taliban is aiming at $1.8 billion in government revenues.

Nurturing this private-sector vision is Deputy Finance Minister Nazir Kabiri, one of the most senior government officials from the ousted administration still in office. A 39-year-old former University of Kentucky Fulbright scholar, he has become an interlocutor with the international community, but he is also explaining the outside world’s thinking to the Taliban.

Mr. Kabiri said he convinced the Taliban to retain the public financial-management systems at the ministry that have been built up over the past 20 years, including the computer system that centrally logs customs revenues as they are collected.

“Grants to the government aren’t coming back anytime soon, so we should turn this crisis into an opportunity and break away from the past dependency on aid,” Mr. Kabiri said. “The government is blocked, sanctioned, but there are no sanctions on Afghan businessmen and the market. And women too are allowed to work in the private sector.”

He said he helped persuade the Taliban to let international aid groups work unimpeded in the country, a commitment that allowed relief to begin flowing again last fall. The regime has come to an arrangement with Washington and the U.N. that allows aid dollars to enter the country without going through the central bank. Under the deal, funds are flown in, deposited in a private Afghan bank, and then used by the U.N. More than $350 million has arrived.

The Taliban hasn’t made it easy for the international community to help. The finance minister, who handled the group’s money when fighting the insurgency, is under international terrorism sanctions, as are many other top officials such as the interior minister. Older girls have so far been barred from attending school, while female civil servants haven’t been allowed to return to work.

For now, international aid will help Afghans survive this winter. The U.N. has made its biggest-ever emergency appeal, for $4.4 billion, to help 24 million Afghans in 2022 with everything from food to healthcare. It is part of the $8 billion it hopes to raise this year to maintain public services and stabilize the economy.

The International Monetary Fund forecasts that the Afghan economy will shrink by nearly a third this year. The $8 billion could create 180,000 jobs in the formal sector and another 500,000 jobs in the informal economy, the U.N. estimates. Getting economic activity going is also key, experts say, in preventing a large-scale exodus of Afghans abroad.

When the Taliban took over, Washington froze the international reserves of Afghanistan’s central bank, leaving the institution nonfunctional. Earlier this month, the U.S. said it would allow half of the $7 billion to be used for humanitarian aid and helping to revive the economy. The other half of the bank’s frozen assets will be set aside as potential compensation for victims of the 9/11 attacks. The Taliban has condemned that move as theft.

The U.S. has pledged more than $500 million in aid since August. It has provided exemptions to sanctions to allow for aid, although the carve-outs don’t apply to the private sector, apart from personal remittances.

Tom West, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan, said addressing the humanitarian and economic crisis was the most urgent priority, and that the U.S. is considering further steps to support the economy. That could include using $3.5 billion released from the reserves to recapitalize the central bank, he said, adding that the bank would first need to be run by professionals and made independent. The bank is currently being run by a member of the Taliban.

The economy is desperately short of local currency and dollars. Banks are severely restricting withdrawals, and Afghan entrepreneurs with money parked outside can’t get it into the country. Even aid organizations can’t bring enough funds in, according to a report by the Norwegian Refugee Council last month.

Some $900 million of the frozen central bank reserves consists of deposits of Afghan commercial banks, according to William Byrd, a senior expert at U.S. Institute of Peace.

“If there’s a private-sector collapse on top of everything else, that will just make the humanitarian situation a lot worse,” he said.

Afghanistan has been dependent on foreign resources of one kind or another for hundreds of years, except for brief periods, Mr. Byrd said. The U.S. alone has pumped $145 billion of economic aid into Afghanistan since 2001—more in today’s dollars than it spent on rebuilding Europe after World War II under the Marshall Plan, according to the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Yet Afghanistan was the poorest country in Asia, by far, when the Taliban took over.

Torek Farhadi, an ex-IMF official who once served as an adviser to the former government of President Hamid Karzai, said that corruption was genuinely down in Afghanistan.

“You cannot get the economy of a country going with humanitarian aid. You have to normalize the economy,” Mr. Farhadi said. “It’s a good time to invest in Afghanistan if sanctions are lifted.”

Afghanistan will likely become even poorer, said Adnan Mazarei, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a think tank in Washington. The country doesn’t have much industry, and a services sector that had grown around the foreign presence is now withering, he said.

“What is Afghanistan going to produce in the near future?” said Mr. Mazarei. “The story isn’t likely to have a good ending.”