In egalitarian Pushtun society, where prestige is won in battle, these grey-beards initially had limited authority.
There are some 60 Pushtun tribes and 400 sub-tribes, many at odds with each other.
His more technocratic replacement, Yusuf Pushtun, will now try to improve security for Kandaharis.
The Northern Alliance may be trying to do the same in Pushtun-dominated areas of the country.
Mr Karzai is from the Pushtun ethnic group, the country's largest, which has traditionally ruled the country.
The sole Pushtun commander in the watch, a village leader from Jalrez, offered to patrol the district's violent areas.
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But Mr Karzai cannot win an election without the help of his brother's network among the southern Pushtun tribes.
One is the Pushtun ethnicity of most Taliban and some 15% of Pakistanis.
Despite this Pushtun grumbling, the hard fact is that the northern allies are so far the only coherent Afghan resistance to the Taliban.
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More than 100 people were reported killed in Pakistan's tribal area of South Waziristan in days of fighting between local ethnic-Pushtun tribesmen and foreign militants.
Mr Qadir, though belonging to the Pushtun majority that ruled Afghanistan for generations, had strong ties with the powerful Northern Alliance which fought the Taliban to the end.
In Bonn the Northern Alliance will face an array of mainly Pushtun groups, drawn primarily from the ranks of exiles rather than from the new power-brokers inside Afghanistan.
Tajiks, however, retained their influence, keeping the ministries of defence and foreign affairs, while the former king, a Pushtun, came under pressure to withdraw from the presidential race.
Rather than seeing the ethnic-Pushtun Taliban as its best hope of a friendly government in Kabul, its policymakers would now prefer the Taliban to be part of a broader-based Afghan government.
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The conventional wisdom is that Afghanistan needs to be led by a Pushtun with credibility among the southern tribes (Mr Karzai's Popolzai are linked to royalty) and, ideally, acceptable to Pakistan.
Mr Karzai is staying his hand only because the IEC balked at accepting the astonishing results from Ghazni, a Pushtun-majority constituency where preliminary counts gave all 11 seats to the Hazara ethnic minority.
But the Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar is still teeming with exiled Pushtun commanders, who say the only thing holding them back is the absence of support from the United States and its allies.
Although it is America's ally, Pakistan maintains links with the predominantly ethnic-Pushtun Taliban in Afghanistan, as a hedge against the day America leaves and a way to thwart a perceived Indian plan of strategic encirclement.
The king's arrival has been welcomed not only by fellow members of the Pushtun ethnic majority, like Mohammed Ali Jalali, of the eastern province of Paktika, but even by General Wasequllah, an ethnic Tajik and former Northern Alliance commander, who has just been named a general in the new Afghan army.
In the short term, NATO hopes that with more Afghan units and extra American troops, perhaps helped by a possible short-term deployment of as many as 10, 000 more European soldiers, it will be able to secure enough of the populated areas in the restive Pushtun belt to ensure a credible presidential election in August.
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