Navigating Pakistan without maps
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One of the things John Kiriakou says he learned quickly and the hard way in Pakistan in 2002 was that there is no such thing as a map. Walking into a shop and asking for one produced a puzzled look: a map, why, where do you need to go? Driving all over Islamabad one day he finally found maps in a stationery shop, copyrighted 1961. He bought all of them, on the reasoning that it was better than nothing.

His explanation is economic rather than mocking. Most Pakistanis, if they are lucky, buy a small motorised scooter; they are not taking the sort of road trips that require an atlas, and they know where they are going.

No street signs, no addresses

The second discovery was that the concept of street signs did not exist either, and neither, functionally, did addresses. Invited to somebody's house, you are not given a number: go down the main street eight tenths of a kilometre, you will see an advertisement for tyres, turn left at the tyre advertisement, then you come upon a great rock, and I am across the street from the rock.

Kiriakou treats this as an operational rather than a cultural observation: "operationally speaking, logistics are almost everything." In Pakistan, it could be a challenge just working out where you were and where you were supposed to be, in a city of twelve million people with no addresses.

The rehearsal

Twenty-four hours before the raids began, Kiriakou realised he had been to the Lahore safe house only once, in daylight, and would need to reach it at night. So he and his colleague simply drove around until they recognised things. Over a flyover, what Pakistanis call an overpass, there was an advertisement for shoes he remembered from the house-hunting trip. In a denser area his colleague remembered a traffic policeman standing on a raised circular concrete stand in the middle of the road. Then a British private school at a T-junction. Then, a mile on, the McDonald's visible from the front of the safe house.

By midnight they had found it. Kiriakou then made them do the whole thing again, driving to the far side of Lahore, getting deliberately lost, and running the sequence a second time in the small hours: flyover, shoe advertisement, traffic policeman, British school, McDonald's. "Okay, now we know where we are."

See also

- The Lahore safe house
- Abu Zubaydah
- Pakistan Station (2002)
- Colonel Khaled
