Far from the battlefields of Kandahar where Hamid Karzai is battling to take over the Taliban's final stronghold, Afghan leaders in Bonn on Wednesday chose him to head the country's interim administration.

Only hours after the peace agreement brokered by the United Nations had been signed, US officials said Mr Karzai had been slightly injured by an errant US bomb. However, he told Britain's Channel Four News that he had not been caught up in the attack.

"He is a dedicated Afghan," said a delegate at the Bonn conference, underlining that part of Mr Karzai's popularity rested on his willingness to risk his life for his country.

In Bonn, Mr Karzai, who comes from Afghanistan's Pashtun majority, was backed by the UN and US, in large part because he represented a counterweight in a cabinet that will be largely made up of members of the ethnic minority groups of the Northern Alliance.

In October, shortly after the US bombing campaign began, the 46-year-old leader slipped over the Pakistan/Afghan border and began to rally Afghans against the Taliban, gathering large followings of Pashtuns willing to fight against a regime that had been their brutal ethnic power-base for five years. He has become the darling of the US and the Taliban's most wanted man. But that was not always the case. The fundamentalist movement, initially won his support for its drive to bring order to Afghanistan. But Mr Karzai's sympathies quickly shifted when Pakistan's intelligence services began to exert their influence over the group.

"These Arabs are in Afghanistan to learn to shoot," one said. "They learn to shoot on live targets and those live targets are the Afghan people, our children our women. We want them out."

His position hardened two years ago, when his father, a former parliamentarian living in Quetta, was assassinated. The murder was widely believed to have been the work of the Taliban.

A middle child of eight siblings who spent much of the 1980s in the US, Mr Karzai came to prominence arming fellow Afghans against Soviet forces in the 1980s and then serving as deputy foreign minister from 1992-1994 under Burhanuddin Rabbani's Mujahideen government.

As comfortable among Afghan warriors as he is among western politicians, Mr Karzai comes from the royal Popalzoi clan, which has produced every Afghanistan monarch since Ahmed Shah Durrani, the Persian soldier who conquered Afghanistan and became its first monarch in 1747.

His family connections with Mohammad Zahir Shah, the popular former king, date back to his grandfather who served as the president of the national council until the monarch was deposed in 1973.

In Bonn, the 87-year-old Zahir Shah turned down the offer to head the interim administration and eventually agreed for the position to go to Mr Karzai - the first choice of Washington and the UN. On December 22, Mr Karzai will become part of a new generation of leaders who will take over the task of rebuilding Afghanistan destroyed by 23 years of war.

He will join a troika of young Northern Alliance leaders who have managed to push aside Mr Rabbani and retain three of the new administration's most critical ministries: Abdullah Abdullah, the foreign minister, Yunus Qanuni, the interior minister and head of the Alliance's delegation in Bonn, and Mohammad Fahim, the group's troop commander.

Mr Abdullah, who comes from the Tajik Panshir Valley and has a Pashtun mother, a medical doctor by training was close friends with Ahmed Shah Masood, the commander of the Northern Alliance who was assassinated in September, days before the terrorist attacks in the US.

He has since become one of the most recognisable Afghan leaders, frequently appearing on western television, speaking fluent English and French. Western diplomats were quickly wooed by his more moderate tone compared with that of Mr Rabbani.

Mr Fahim, the Northern Alliance's military commander and Mr Masood's long-time lieutenant, took over command of the group's troops when his mentor was assassinated in September. As Mr Masood's deputy and chief of intelligence, Mr Fahim became the Northern Alliance's military chief just two days before the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York.

Mr Qanuni, who became the Northern Alliance's interior minister after it captured Kabul, led the Alliance's delegation at Bonn and was the most important player at the table. "He walks like a man who has power," a western diplomat said of the elegant man whose limp gives away an old war injury. An ethnic Tajik, Mr Qanuni joined Mr Masood's forces when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and was appointed spokesman of the Mujahideen council, which was created in the late 1980s.

Mr Qanuni is widely respected within the Northern Alliance, and was chosen to speak at Mr Masood's funeral.

The question now, diplomats say, is whether these men prove as capable at leading in peace as in war.