I think you meant National Geographic, but I see your point. As a matter of fact, the Tocharians settled in Afghanistan before they founded the Kushan Empire. That is where Zhang Qian, a Chinese ambassador, found them in 128 B.C., after the Xiongnu had driven them out of Gansu.
When Richard Francis Burton, the 19th-century explorer, sneaked into Mecca, he explained his European features by telling any Moslem who asked that he was from Afghanistan. That Afghan girl may very well have Tocharian ancestors in her family tree.
IMO, one of the biggest problems people have in understanding Caucasian migrations is the fact that they start with the idea that Caucasians were always in Europe. They weren't, they migrated there from points way east maybe as far as Japan or even further east.
It looks like a group migrated to Europe before 25,000 years ago and then were seperated and isolated there (Iberia) during the Last Glacial Maximum(LGM, the coldest period of the whole Ice Age, 18-23,000 years ago) and everyone in between died due to the cold. Those isolated folks in Iberia are probably the Basque of today. It was during the LGM that the European Neanderthals died out or were assimilated with that isolated group of Caucasians in Iberia.
Professor Stephen Oppenheimer's DNA studies indicate that about 50% of today's Europeans can trace their DNA to one man from the Indus Valley who made their way to Europe through the Middle East. The other 50% can trace their DNA to a son of the same man who made their way to Europe through Russia a thousand years later.
The original homeland of Europeans and Caucasians is somewhere even farther east...maybe even SE Asia where it was nice and warm during the last Ice Age.
you are correct.
She has been photographed only twice in her life, once in an Afghan refugee camp as an orphaned girl with a haunting stare, and now, 18 years later, as a woman and mother who has survived a lifetime of bloody conflict. Sharbat Gula was aged about 12 when an American photographer took her portrait in December 1984, an image that was to become a 20th-century icon after it made the June 1985 cover of National Geographic magazine.
http://www.layneredmond.com/sharbat1.htm