Sharbat Gula's haunting green eyes were immortalized on the cover of National Geographic in 1985. You might have seen her while sitting at a dentist's office, or while bending over to pick up your mail, but whenever it was, it was hard to pull your eyes away. Her penetrating stare seemed to encompass the pain of Afghanistan's civil war, and the perseverance of the refugees who fled to Pakistan. She was just 12 when she was photographed by Steve McCurry in a camp for displaced people in Peshawar, the biggest city along Pakistan's frontier with Afghanistan. Now in her 40s, she is still in Peshawar, but as of this week, she is in police custody. Pakistani immigration officials detained her on charges that she possessed a fake Pakistani national identification card. They had been investigating her for years, and last year Pakistani media published the picture attached to her allegedly fake identification card. As an Afghan national, she should not have been able to obtain such a card.

She knows, but only learned about it decades later. The photographer went back like 20 years later to try to find her. He did, and he took another pic of her again, and on it she still has the eyes obviously as they are but they seem more hollow, less determined than she is on that NG cover. I can't remember where I saw that, I'll look it up.