Finding distances in astronomy is notoriously difficult. With accurate optical spectroscopy, both the distance to and extinction (reddening) of normal stars can be found, but this is not possible for X-ray sources. It is possible, however, to measure the extincting column from an X-ray spectrum from photoelectric ionisation edges. It is also possible to construct the function of reddening along the line of sight using field red-clump (helium-burning giants) stars in the infrared. I will demonstrate this method to derive distances for the Anomalous X-ray Pulsars (AXPs). With these new distances, it turns out that all the AXPs have remarkably similar 2-10 keV luminosities, a clue to their internal processes. Our method succeeds for the AXPs, despite its many-step nature and poorly defined conversions. This hints that the two measurables involved-soft-X-ray extinction and infrared reddening-are far better correlated than the separate relations linking them would initially suggest. Such a correlation would be very useful, and the observational resources exist to be able to establish it.