Much has been said about the future of Afghan women and girls once again under Taliban rule in Afghanistan, and for good reason. We are already seeing that, despite the Taliban’s dubious claims that their government would guarantee “all [women’s] rights within the limits of Islam,” the reality is proving otherwise.

It has been a full month since girls have been de facto banned from attending secondary school. No women have been named to the Taliban’s newly appointed Cabinet. In some areas controlled by the Taliban, women have been told they cannot seek medical care without a male relative as an escort. Others have been forcibly married off to militants.

Perhaps the most worrying signal of a return to oppressive, draconian rule is the transformation of the former Ministry of Women’s Affairs into the newly re-established Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue. This change marks the return of the Taliban’s notorious enforcer in the 1990s — charged with punishing women who violated restrictions on everything from going out in public without a male guardian to a reductive and repressive dress code.

America must once again lead the movement to protect the rights of the most vulnerable in Afghanistan. Even though our military has left the country, America can and must use the full array of its diplomatic and economic muscle to pressure the Taliban to adhere to its earlier promises to treat women and girls more humanely. Moreover, we must be prepared to punish the group if it continues down its current path.

The Taliban has requested to participate as a member of the UN.

Under no circumstances should the U.S. recognize the Taliban — or give it access to any of the billions of dollars in foreign aid that was frozen when the Kabul government fell — until protections for women and girls are restored.

America and its allies gave a generation of women and girls the chance to pursue an education and taste economic freedom, and millions of them did so.

All of this progress is now at risk. America simply cannot allow the country to become once again the only in the world to ban an entire gender from accessing their basic human right to education.

At least 80% of those fleeing the country in recent months have been women and children. We already have a resettlement mechanism for Afghans who aided the U.S. government in the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program; however, most principal applicants are men. In parallel, we must also generously resettle women and girls, whether through the State Department’s authorization of priority refugee status for Afghans, or through a special humanitarian parole category – an idea endorsed by dozens of senators from both parties.

Krish O’Mara Vignarajah is the president and chief executive of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.