A HILLTOP NEAR KABUL - Sitting in their unlit house, behind six-metre-high mud brick walls in the heart of a village so hostile to outsiders even heavily armed international troops rarely venture down its narrow roads and lanes, the al-Qaeda militants must have felt safe. They were wrong. From a barren, windswept hilltop kilometres away, the men of 42-Charlie are watching. "There you go," exults Corporal Chris Nadon, pointing at the screen in front of him showing a bearded man peering suspiciously out of a window far below. "Close enough to count the hairs in his nostril." The crew of...