Tom Allard – Special Detachment 88, or Densus 88, is a crack counter-terrorism unit that officers dream of joining.

Many Indonesians admire its success in hunting down terrorists and preventing attacks.

It has about 400 members attached to its command in Jakarta and hundreds more in the country's 33 provinces, with heavy representations in Papua and Maluku. Its members are easily the best resourced within the Indonesian National Police.

Formed after the Bali bombings in 2002 brought mass-casualty terrorism so shockingly to Indonesia, Detachment 88 was, at its inception, equipped and trained in large part by the United States and Australia, which provided it with high-level training in communications interception, close combat, forensic sciences, surveillance and intelligence gathering and analysis.

It has a facility at the Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement Co-operation, set up in 2004 with almost $40 million of Australian funding. According to the centre's website, the Australian Federal Police still run most of the counter-terrorism seminars.

Detachment 88 also benefits from the $16 million in annual funding allocated to the AFP to combat terrorism in south-east Asia.