By NBC News’ Atia Abawi

KABUL – I was living in Afghanistan when I first heard the news that Richard Holbrooke had been appointed by President Barack Obama as the new U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan in January 2009.

There was a sense of genuine excitement among those of us working in Afghanistan who knew of Holbrooke's past accomplishments and who cared about trying to make this a stable and prosperous country.

I had the opportunity to meet Holbrooke on various occasions in Kabul. But the most memorable meeting I had was when I interviewed him last January on one of his many trips to the Afghan capital.

He didn't have much time before leaving to catch a flight out and his staff was anxious that we hurry up and get the interview going.

Holbrooke remained calm and relaxed, sharing jokes and memories of people we both knew in the worlds of journalism and diplomacy. He was a man with several decades of experience and I was just in the beginning of my career, but he seemed genuinely interested in my background and my thoughts on Afghanistan.

He was an intimidating figure.  During roundtables with journalists I saw him bite off more than a few heads and witnessed the embarrassment that some of those reporters endured after “getting it” from the “titan.”

Courtesy Dan Wilkinson, U.S. State Department

NBC's Atia Abawi meets Richard Holbrooke, the late U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, for an interview in Kabul.

But after my one-on-one interview, I was impressed by his genuine concern about a country and a mission that was spiraling out of control.

One of the challenges of his tenure was the obvious tension between him and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.  Both men are considered proud and hate being told what to do. But it was Holbrooke's job to build a relationship with Karzai in order to help best serve America's interest in Afghanistan.

After the 2009 presidential elections it was rumored that Holbrooke stormed out of a room after a heated disagreement with Karzai on ballot stuffing and fraud. Although both parties denied the rumors, insiders said there was an explosive exchange. "The Karzai meeting this morning was hot," Holbrooke was quoted saying in Bob Woodward's book “Obama's Wars” about one of his many meetings with him.

The Afghan president at times even refused to meet with Holbrooke, who shrugged it off and was quoted as telling a group of journalists, "[Karzai's] an enormously tough customer," but added with a smile, "as you've heard, so am I."

On Tuesday, Karzai called Holbrooke's death "a big loss for the American people."

Although he may not have had the best connection with the Afghan leadership, and even some officials within the U.S. government related to the mission, there was no doubt he cared about what would happen in Afghanistan.

The Washington Post reported today that his last words after being sedated was to his Pakistani surgeon, "You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan."

By Richard Engel, NBC News chief foreign correspondent

BAMAKO, Mali – The Aga Khan, now 73 years old, is one of the most active philanthropists in the Islamic world, yet is remarkably unknown. 
 
He is the wealthy leader of a religious group with millions of followers, a Harvard graduate, the grandson of the former president the League of Nations and the stepson of Hollywood bombshell Rita Hayworth; yet when I ask most people if they know who he is, I am usually met with blank stares.
 
I first thought to interview the Aga Khan in the fall of 2009. I was in a kebab restaurant in Kabul along with Afghans, who, between bites, were looking up somewhat inattentively at a television. 

On the screen, Afghan President Hamid Karzai was being sworn in for another term. Like most political events in Afghanistan, the inauguration was highly choreographed. The seating and order of the speakers are highly studied and, at least to those involved, very significant. There were lots of red carpets, big hats, turbans and gold chairs. And prominently seated close to Karzai, was the Aga Khan. I wondered why.

I discovered the Aga Khan and his foundations are among the biggest private donors and employers in all of Afghanistan. His work focuses on cultural development. The mandate is to give both pride and economic empowerment to poor communities by engaging them in the renovation of art, music and architecture. I’ve since seen his projects in Afghanistan, Egypt and Mali.
 
I met the Aga Khan in Mali’s capital Bamako. He was in Mali to open a park he had funded the renovation of on behalf of the city. Although he has been interviewed for American documentaries and European television stations, he told me this was the first interview he’s ever done with an American television network.  

 
Who is the Aga Khan?
The Aga Khan is a title. It belongs to the leader of a Shiite Muslim community. The world’s Muslims are generally divided into two basic groups: Sunnis and Shiites.

The reality is that Islam is much more diverse. Among Shiites, there are divisions, factions and theological differences. The Aga Khan is the leader of one branch of Shia Islam and his followers are called Ismailis.

Ismailis, who live in over 25 countries around the world mostly in central and southern Asia, believe that the Aga Khan is the legitimate heir to the Prophet Muhammad. There are an estimated 12-15 million Ismailis worldwide who revere the Aga Khan as their spiritual guide. They donate part of their annual incomes to the Aga Khan’s foundations, which he, as leader, re-distributes. Not surprisingly, the Aga Khan’s claim of Islamic heritage is contested by non-Ismailis.  
 
The Aga Khan today
The current Aga Khan assumed the role in 1957 when he was 20 years old. He took the title from his grandfather, the late Aga Khan, who was also one of the presidents of the League of Nations.  Most Americans, however, remember the current Aga Khan’s father, Prince Aly Khan who was married to Hollywood bombshell Rita Hayworth. 
 
Much of the Aga Khan’s time today is focused on his charity, the Aga Khan Development Network. During our interview we spoke about the charity, but I also asked his opinion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and increasing tensions and mistrust of Muslims by some Americans.
 
Engel:  We are meeting in a park you have renovated in Mali. Why Mali?

Aga Khan: Mali is a rather unusual country in Africa because first of all it has an effective cultural hub in northern Mali, which is unusual in sub-Saharan Africa ... and we want to work with that. Secondly, it has a form of pluralism in the interpretation of its faith, which is very welcome in the Islamic world.  
 
Engel: I have seen many development projects around the world, particularly American projects. They tend not to focus on cultural development. They focus on economic development, sanitation and works projects. Why do you focus on culture?
 
Aga Khan: I discovered through work in the architectural field that the cultural dimension of the Islamic world was an extraordinarily powerful trampoline for development. There is a phenomenon that the populations of these cultural sites are often the poorest in the country for reasons which would take too long to explain. So acting in culture, you’re actually developing the quality of life for the poorest people who’ve been recently urbanized.  You’re re-establishing value to the culture, you’re giving old a new form, new forms of productivity and you’re creating a totally new economic, socioeconomic environment. In the past it was done with dams for irrigation and agriculture. It was done with roads to sell agricultural goods.  It’s being done with microcredit. All of that can link to the cultural programs also.  
 
Engel: There’s also a role of dignity attached to cultural projects. They don’t just make people richer, they give pride. Is that a goal?
 
Aga Khan: It's giving value back to the cultures. It's helping generations come together because acculturation is one of the problems we’re facing in the Islamic world. The fact that we’re able to rebuild pride in this culture – which is not a culture in the past, but must be one of today and tomorrow also – brings a totally different psychological attitude to the process of change.

Engel: What is the role of the Aga Khan today?
 
Aga Khan: Well, I’m a Shia imam. I am the only hereditary Shia imam within the Shia community of peoples. And an imam in Islam is responsible for the security of people who are referred to him. He is responsible for the interpretation of faith and he is responsible for their quality of life so those three areas are areas, which are my responsibility.  
 
Engel:  Mali isn’t part of your community. Other countries where you do projects are not part of your community. Why reach out?
 
Aga Khan: We [Ismailis] are obviously a minority in the Islamic world. I don’t think any minority can live divorced from the majority and our interest frankly is to see the countries of the Islamic world move forward in a peaceful and organized way to achieve a better quality of life, but without losing their values. I think that can be best achieved by a series of multiple inputs. Some touch value systems, some touch education, health care and economic sustainability, so that’s why the Aga Khan Development Network has tried to create capacity in all of these areas.
 
Engel: You have served as the Aga Khan for more than five decades now, do you have a mission? Do you have a goal that you want to achieve?
 
Aga Khan: I think that the nature of the office of the imam, whether it’s a Shia imam or a Sunni imam, is to have the capacity to achieve results. When my grandfather died in 1957, the Ismaili Imamate did not have the vehicles in the structured manner that it has today to act in these various fields internationally. Today it has that capacity.
 
Engel: I was surprised, and I think a lot of our viewers will be surprised, by the extent of your activities around the world.  Half a billion dollars given out in charity and development every year.  It’s a huge network.
 
Aga Khan: It is a very big network. It’s grown obviously over the years and it’s been driven by recognition of need as time has gone by. We have felt that working in Africa, working in Asia, there were needs that have come up that we did necessarily [have] in 1957.

I will give you an example.  If you look at the Islamic world, you will see that its geography is heavily concentrated in the worst seismic parts of our world. Well crisis response and anticipation of these crises wasn’t part of our thinking.  Now it would be very silly to ignore for another 50 years the fact that the Islamic world has places where there are earthquakes and people die.  
 
Engel: You live a very private life, you don’t do very many media interviews.  It’s a very different public persona than your father. Why have you chosen to stay out of the limelight?

Aga Khan: I have always taken the attitude that it’s better that the work should speak rather than the individual and I have wanted the projects to be meaningful to my community and the people around them.  I prefer to let the people who work with me do their work, hopefully effectively.
 
Engel: How would you describe the state of Islam? Do you think your projects help encourage a more moderate discourse and encourage elements who stand up to extremism?
 
Aga Khan: I think the Islamic world is suffering from a number of stresses. It’s suffering from stresses within the interpretation of the faith.  It’s suffering from stresses in modern statehood, governance. It’s suffering from economic, inherited political stresses, which are today seen as theological stresses, where as they weren’t born in theology. They were born in politics. I think it’s important to create an environment where these stresses don’t become so aggressive that they cause conflict.  
 
Engel: How do you see the conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan affecting the Islamic world?  Do you see stability in that part of the world?
 
Aga Khan: I think it will take a long time. I think it’s very dangerous to generalize about these situations, but there are some characteristics that are common and one of them is acute poverty.  Northwest Pakistan, northern Waziristan, southern Waziristan, most of Afghanistan, these are areas of the world with horrible poverty. So I think the first thing is to try to replace that fear of poverty and the pain that goes with it by some sense of hope in the future, that things don’t have to be that way but they can change. 

Secondly, what is the process of change?  How do you bring stability?  I believe very strongly in civil society. What I’ve seen in the past 50 years is that civil society is the best guarantor of change. 
 
Engel: Do you think the U.S. military approach is going to be successful? Is it playing a positive or negative role?
 
Aga Khan: I think it can play a positive role, but it’s not a single solution. There’s no such thing as a single solution. I think there must be to be a process of reduction of conflict and its replacement by the process of development. It's much better that it be done by the police rather than by the military. These are things that have to happen, but they happen too slowly.
 
Engel: The American global war on terrorism is often seen as a war against Islam on the popular level.  Do you think the wars that have been launched by U.S. administrations over the last decade or so have done more harm than good?
 
Aga Khan: I certainly think the invasion of Iraq was a serious mistake. We had crisis situations before that. We had them in Kashmir. We had them in the Middle East. If you look at the origins of those crises, they were political not religious. At the moment, it’s the horrible conflicts which are dominating the image of the Islamic world and I can say without one iota of fear that is totally wrong, totally wrong. You had wars in the Christian world, you had wars in the Jewish world. But you don’t define them in theological terms anymore, except Northern Ireland.
 
Engel: You talked about the invasion of Iraq as being a big mistake. What about Afghanistan?
 
Aga Khan: Well I think the situation in Afghanistan was very, very uncomfortable indeed.  It was born of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and that’s where the whole thing started. Then, of course, it degraded because there were all sorts of external influences to try to push the Russians out of Afghanistan.  At the time, sadly people didn’t realize that there was such a fracturing of society in Afghanistan.
 
Engel: Right now there is tension, and you can feel it on the streets, in the United States, in Western Europe, in relations with Muslim communities. What can be done to improve that and why do you think that tension is there?  
 
Aga Khan: I’ve always referred to it as a conflict of ignorance and I still believe that’s the root of the problem. It’s very difficult. 

If you look at the history of education in the industrialized world, you go back to the 1960s, there was no presence of Islamic culture. It was amazing. The Muslim world didn’t exist. Why? Because your educational background was a Judeo Christian background. No problem with that, but it didn’t adjust to the new world dimension. It must adjust to that new world dimension and that’s what’s happening now.

By Michele Neubert, NBC News Producer

STOCKHOLM, Sweden – Mikael Blomkvist vs. Julian Assange?

Best-selling fictional muck-raking journalist vs. headline-stealing international man of mystery (and possibly a journalist).

Tale of government conspiracies and hackers vs. tale of government conspiracies and hackers.

What they have in common: Sweden, and sometimes it’s hard to separate fact from fiction.

For example, he’s been described as "sexy, confident, at times disarming,” or "interesting, brave, admirable.”

No, that’s not Blomkvist, one of the world's best known fictional characters thanks to Swedish author Stieg Larsson's madly popular “Millennium Trilogy.” Those are real-life comments from interns who worked with the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Readers of the books – full of complicated conspiracies – will see some of the inevitable parallels between the fiction and non-fiction Swedish tales: computer hackers, crusading journalists, tales of vicious sexual assaults and rape. 

Sweden has issued an international arrest warrant for Assange, who is accused of rape and sexual molestation in one case and of sexual molestation and unlawful coercion in another. He’s now behind bars in London after a judge rejected his bail request Tuesday.The accusations were originally brought against him last August, but quickly dropped. Then with the recent spate of WikiLeaks revelations - the release of 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables online – the allegations curiously remerged, and were deemed sufficient enough to solicit an Interpol arrest warrant.

Assange has denied the allegations and has suggested the prosecution is being manipulated for political reasons.

It’s a scenario that even Stieg Larsson couldn’t have dreamt up.

On the Assange trail…
Just a few months ago, I was part of an NBC News team in Stockholm doing a feature on the "Girl with a Dragoon Tattoo” craze.

We visited locations where the film version of the book was shot, sipped buckets of coffee in Blomkvist's favorite cafes and caused great curiosity shooting a stand up in the trilogy's heroine Lisbeth Salander's favorite food store, 7-11. Then we caught up with a group of tourists (mostly American) who were doing the Millennium walking tour, re-living all the major venues of the books’ intrigue.  

We were back in Stockholm again last week, but this time on what seemed to resemble more of a life imitating art assignment: reporting on Assange and his Swedish WikiLeaks connections.

Our assignment to find the alleged victims of sexual assault by Assange and to see if they would talk. And like it or not, as readers of the Millennium trilogy, we couldn’t get that tale of intrigue out of our minds.

We arrived in a snowy, freezing cold, Stockholm late in the evening and up against deadline. The first piece of luck was to find the lawyer who represented the two women, Claes Borgstrom. He is the type of campaigning lawyer character Larsson or Salander would very much have approved of, a respected ombudsman fighting sexual discrimination who pulls no punches. “He's the ultimate male feminist if such a thing exists,” one government official told us.

He made it perfectly clear his clients would not be available, but thankfully he would. 

Next was to try and nail down what could easily have been one of Larsson's "Swedish Establishment" characters, the Swedish prosecutor  Marianne Ny. She is the person who issued the latest arrest warrant that triggered the arrest of Assange.

After some persuasion we were able to meet this composed woman who gently (and convincingly) explained to us, "There have been no contacts whatsoever from other countries and authorities." She added, "This has nothing to do with WikiLeaks and has been handled as every other case."

"He is accused of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion," she said, spelling out the allegations. She is hopeful that he will be extradited to Sweden after his arrest.

What about the Swedish WikiLeaks servers? Were they at least still safe? After some late night searching, we found their server provider company, Bahnhof, on the side of a snowy hillside. The entrance was through a thick steel door reminiscent of a nuclear bunker. Inside, sealed glass doors restricted movement everywhere, but we did get chance to film this remarkable high-tech room with 8,000 servers – only two of them dedicated to WikiLeaks. 

Jon Karlung, Bahnhof’s director, said it would continue to stand by WikiLeaks as a client. "It’s a high-profile customer, but once you have a customer you have to stand by them,” he said. “And as long as there are no legal claims from Swedish authorities and we comply with Swedish law, we will stand up for our clients.”

To make sure nothing jeopardizes that, Bahnhof has set aside a separate network for its WikiLeaks servers to ensure extra back up and safeguard that any future web attacks wouldn’t affect other customers. Blomkvist and Salander, let alone Assange, would have been relieved.

Most liberal freedom of speech in the world
That kind of protection helps explain why Assange chose Sweden as a safe haven.

"He feels safe here, especially that his information is safe because Sweden has the most liberal freedom of press and freedom of speech laws that you can find on  this planet, " explained Morgan Olofsson, one of Sweden's foremost TV news directors.

(As we drew up in the car outside the elegant town house venue where we caught up with Olofsson, we saw the name of the street "Bellmansgatan," wasn't that the street Blomkvist lived on?!)

But we asked Olofsson if anywhere can be safe when superpowers like the U.S. are riled? 

"I'm not a big fan of conspiracies,” Olofsson told us. “But you do start to wonder how all this fits together, are all these dots connected? How come this new arrest warrant happens at the same time, in the same week as all these damaging publications regarding U.S. diplomacy? Is there maybe , and I doubt it being a strong believer in rationality, but you  begin to wonder if a big superpower like the U.S. has put pressure on the Swedish prosecutor or not? That is my big question [and it’s] many people’s question I think.”

Next chapter?
We  also obtained copies of the court documents for the rape and sexual misconduct allegations. Needless to say we can’t divulge much of what we read or where it came from (and many important sections had been deleted by the police already). But we spent a curious hour sitting in a fashionable lakeside hotel drinking (yes, tons of coffee), trying to patch together what they documents meant with our local fixer.

The bottom line is that sexually liberal Sweden takes sexual misconduct incredibly seriously. And the interpretations of what kind of conduct can be interpreted as sexual molestation or rape are surprisingly wide ranging.

With Assange behind bars, the United States still riled up about the leaks, the next chapter – when the WikiLeaks founder appears again in court on Dec. 14 – should be another page turner.

Click for more: Assange charges: Consensual sex or rape?

Rebecca Blackwell / AP

A young man throws a tire onto a fire as supporters of opposition leader Alassane Ouattara protest in the Marcory neighborhood of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Friday.

Despite high hopes that national elections would unite the long-divided Ivory Coast, a dispute over election results may plunge the West African nation back into violent conflict.

After days of delay, on Thursday evening the head of the electoral commission declared opposition candidate Alassane Ouattara the winner of the first presidential election in a decade.

Ouattara, a former prime minister and top International Monetary Fund official, won 54.1 percent of the vote, defeating President Laurent Gbagbo, who won 45.9 percent of the vote, according to the country’s election commission. Those results were considered credible by the African Union, the United Nations and the White House. 

But not so fast, said the incumbent Gbagbo, whose five-year mandate as president expired in 2005 and who has stayed in office ever since claiming elections were impossible because of the threat of violence. 

He called the announcement of Ouattara’s victory by the election commission an “attempted coup” and on Friday, Ivory Coast’s Constitutional Council reversed the earlier poll results and declared Gbagbo the winner of Sunday’s election.

Schalk van Zuydam / AP

Supporters of Ivory Coast opposition leader Alassane Ouattara react as news spread that President Laurent Gbagbo won the election in the city of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Friday.

Wait, what?

The head of the Constitutional Council, a Gbagbo appointee, said that the results in seven regions in the north of the country, where Ouattara is most popular, were fraudulent. Naturally, those results were thrown out – awarding Gbagbo the presidency again.

Predictably, Ouattara’s supporters are not pleased with the results. As soon as the news was read out on national TV, angry youths took to the streets burning tires in protest, throwing chunks of concrete and tearing down billboards.

Divided in two by civil war in 2002-2003, the Ivory Coast has had an uneasy peace for the past several years. The elections were meant to patch-up the divisions still dividing the country – north vs. south, Muslim vs. Christian, “native Ivorian” vs. migrant worker.

Once hailed as a model of stability and progress in volatile West Africa, the Ivory Coast was a beacon for migrant workers in the region. It held bragging rights for the first ice-skating rink in sub-Saharan Africa and Abidjan, the country’s capital, was dubbed the “Paris of Africa.”

Thibault Camus / AP

Supporters of Laurent Gbagbo celebrate ahead an electoral board of Gbagbo in the streets of Adjame neighborhood, in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Friday, after the constitutional council declared incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo the winner a day after the election chief handed victory to the opposition.

An Ebony magazine article from December 1970 called the “African Riviera” hailed a multimillion dollar plan to expand Abidjan’s Hotel Ivoire into a world class resort.

“The political stability of the Ivory Coast, its economic vitality and highly developed culture, [the project’s backers, including then-President Houphet-Boigny] believe, combined with the natural beauty of its lagoons and palm-lined islands, make this small tropical country an ideal site for an international consortium.”

Those dreams of a West African paradise of peace and stability seem a long way off looking at the photos of angry youths taking the streets Friday.

However, the U.N. endorsed Ivory Coast's provisional election results declaring Ouattara the winner Friday, so perhaps cooler heads will prevail and the country won’t return to violence.  

/

Qatari fans celebrate at Aspire Park in Doha December 2, 2010, after the announcement that Qatar will host the 2022 World Cup. 

FADI AL-ASSAAD / Reuters

A girl celebrates at Souk Waqif in Doha December 2, 2010, after the announcement that Qatar will host the 2022 World Cup.

By Charlene Gubash, NBC News Cairo producer

Doha is a great place for rest and sun, but soccer fans heading to the 2022 World Cup, beware: Qatar is not a place where you BYOB. All bags are x-rayed at the airport for any banned alcohol.

Qatar subscribes to the same brand of conservative Wahhabi Islam as its neighbor Saudi Arabia, and forbids drinking alcohol, but it is much more easygoing about applying it. You can  imbibe at the many luxury five-star hotels, as well as any other hotels with liquor licenses, in the peninsula nation bordering the Persian Gulf. And for the lucky few, the Ritz Carlton executive lounge serves a bottomless glass of good scotch. Qatar has also reclaimed land from the ocean to create Pearl Island, similar to Dubai's famous Palm Island. Many of the two dozen  restaurants on the glamorous island also serve liquor. 

Residents say Qatar is a great place to raise a family. There is no evidence of prostitution and a low crime rate.

After all, fun is in the eye of the beholder. If soccer fans like shopping at huge air-conditioned malls, jogging the ocean-side boardwalk or setting sail in a traditional wooden Dhow, they can have a good time off the soccer pitch too. Maybe a bit highbrow for rowdy football fans, but residents recommend the renovated old market, the Souk, and the beautiful Museum of Islamic Art. 

Those craving a little more excitement can also take to the desert in 4-wheel drives and dune buggies for some “dune bashing,” or try their hand at camel riding and falconry.

But don't expect Dubai-style glitz. “I like it because the management is excellent,” said one expat, who asked not to be named. “Going forward, they are not like Dubai counting on prostitution [for revenue], but on sporting events, business conferences  and education.”