Public Policy Analysis under Military Governance in Pakistan: A Comparative Study of Two Contrasting Regimes

Abstract

Intermittent Military regimes have been attached to the politics of Pakistan since its birth. Pakistan has witnessed drastic swings in public policies in each different military regime; starting from the one of Field Marshal Ayub Khan to the most recent one of Musharraf. For this paper, we shall be comparing and contrasting between two dissimilar military regimes of Zia and Musharraf. It is found that public policy during Musharraf’s regime was more effective and yielded fruitful results. On the other hand, Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, despite being an effective leader, failed to devise an effective public policy. The main issues of Zia have translated into economic distress of today, since current happening are a by–product of Zia’s regime. Root-Cause Analysis (RCA) has been done using the back propagation technique to identify the problems in the public policy during Zia-ul-Haq’s regime. Also, a couple of hypothesis have been formulated which have been supported by the results of RCA. Results have been as per the expectation, since the impacts of past happenings on today’s environment have been pronounced. The two alternative hypotheses that were formulated against the null hypothesis are accepted against the rejection of null hypothesis, as per the results.

Keywords: Public Policy, Military regime, Socioeconomic distress