The way the modern world is structured right now (partly or mostly led by the US), populations have various ways to make a living: some are obvious and "traditional", like agriculture. Some are equally obvious and modern (like industrial manufacturing) and some are based on extraction of valuable minerals (the biggest example being oil). Since in the last category, the extraction is done by a relatively small number of people, frequently foreigners, the way the local population gets the money is frequently problematic. Someone grabs power and takes the money on behalf of the whole nation, but corruption and widespread dissatisfaction with the way the wealth is being shared are almost a given.

All this is old hat. But there seems to be another way to make a living that is less obvious or less noted: i.e. nuisance value. One could argue that if the US ends up paying tens of billions per year to afghanistan to help them "develop", that will be a good use of nuisance value by the afghan people...after all, other equally poor countries are not getting injections of billions of dollars and thousands of highly paid aid workers. Pakistan has more of a real economy than Afghanistan, but the army certainly sells nuisance value too (pay us well or the whole region blows up)....before paknationalists jump on me, I will propose that the same model may apply to the US if the real economy continues to decline. And its not really new. Many of the great conquerors of history were basically using military prowess to grab other people's money, this is just a more refined version of the same scam.
If Yemeni oil is running out, does it not make sense for Yemen to sell nuisance value??