It's like marriage in the majority of places and times throughout history, regardless of culture or religion. Sad but true.

The other alternative is not sending their girls to school at all. Since the alternative you provide is offensive to many of them, if they must choose they will choose the option the Taliban is trying to force them to choose.

Just because they're not extremists doesn't mean they've fully embraced women's lib, as I tried to explain in the other post.

By people who fall into neither group, as I just finished explaining.

Mostly by the fact that the various camps in this conflict do not fit neatly into the simple dichotomy that we in the West -myself included, much of the time- find it all too easy to draw. There is a spectrum, and the various groups fall into various points among it.

I agree with you that people should never be barred from education on account of gender, but note that I used the word never: a word I think you would also be willing to use. That's an extreme term, in the sense that there's no way to go further, and that puts us solidly on an endpoint of the spectrum. This isn't a bad thing, but we need to acknowledge where we are, because it means that we have a question of idealism versus pragmatism to consider.

In a place like Afghanistan, support for our side therefore depends in large part on which groups we are willing to accommodate and which we are not. If we accommodate only those which agree with us in total, we will never get anything done. The pragmatic way takes longer, but it is less likely to be pulled out from under us in one stroke by the likes of the Taliban. If this is worth doing -and I think it is- then it's worth doing in a way that will stand up to the next hundred years of conflict.

Because our faith-powered rockets keep failing! I blame Joseph. He's seemed pretty doubtful that it could work, with his fancy-schmancy physics degree. His lack of faith is disturbing our rocket!

That makes sense if you don't consider defending DOMA, or seeking to have it brought under judicial review for constitutionality, to be getting anything done.

They may both say "it should be left to the states" which is true, strictly speaking. Yet they differ in the federal government's role in this decision -- specifically, whether states should be required to respect another state's decision to allow gays to marry, and whether federal employees can receive benefits tied to marriage.

This would alienate many of those who are willing to accept girls going to school in the first place. It would be somewhat analogous to trying to solve the problem people had with blacks receiving an education at all in the Reconstruction era by forcing integration 80 years early. In trying to stymie your foes, you've only succeeded in multiplying them.

Basically, the situation is more complicated than complete backward asshats willing to poison girls just to punish them for trying to become educated, and equality-of-sexes feminists.

Uh I don't think you get the import. This wasn't an attack against random women, it was an attack against women seeking an education. They are aware that they need women. They would rather those women stay at home and spit out then take care of sons rather than seek to better themselves.

The message is: Women who seek to become educated will be targeted with violence. Remain at home, weak, ignorant, and dependent. Then there will be slightly less^W^W no violence.

Naw, disingenuous. They're framing the usual BS anti-AGW arguments like "they didn't consider alternative explanations" (monumentally false) with a flimsy rhetorical device to make it sound like they're just bemoaning the current state of things which just happens to be the fault of the scientists...

Absurd and silly are synonyms. There may be a specific definition/connotation of absurd you are referring to where this is not the case, but nevertheless.