To hear some observers tell it, after President Joe Biden, the men most responsible for the chaos unfolding in Afghanistan right now are former President Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo.

In an interview with National Review, Pompeo rejected the charge outright.

“It is nonsense,” he said. “It is, in fact, nonsense on stilts.”

Two successive Trump national-security advisers are among those who have leveled this accusation. H. R. McMaster, who served as Trump’s first national-security adviser, accused Pompeo of signing a “capitulation agreement” with the Taliban which all but guaranteed the Afghan military and government’s eventual collapse. "The Taliban didn't defeat us. We defeated ourselves,” McMaster told journalist Bari Weiss.

John Bolton, who succeeded McMaster as national-security adviser, expressed similar sentiments when asked to diagnose the failure, telling CNN that while Biden bears “primary responsibility,” Trump would have likely made similar mistakes. “On this question of withdrawal from Afghanistan, Trump and Biden are like tweedledee and tweedledum,” Bolton said.

The agreement Pompeo signed in Doha in February 2020 established a U.S. withdrawal deadline of May 2021 — provided the Taliban met a series of conditions. Making a complete break from al-Qaeda was among them.

Critics of the deal have said that it was naïve in the extreme to accept the Taliban’s word that they would break with al-Qaeda, considering their deep historical ties, and have argued that negotiating directly with the Taliban undermined and demoralized the Afghan government. According to former CIA counter-terrorism chief Doug London, Pompeo ignored politically inconvenient intelligence reports which predicted the current reality on the ground: as of June, al-Qaeda maintained a presence in 15 Afghan provinces, according to a United Nations report.

However, having served as CIA director before taking over as secretary of state, Pompeo says he was very aware of intelligence reports that al-Qaeda was still deeply engaged in Afghanistan when he signed the Doha agreement. He stressed that the May withdrawal deadline was “conditions-based,” and implied that a second-term Trump administration would have maintained a small military footprint on the ground past the May deadline, once it became clear the Taliban weren’t holding up their end of the bargain.

“I never believed a thing they said,” Pompeo said of the Taliban’s vow to sever ties with al-Qaeda. “It was a condition.”

What McMaster and other critics are missing, Pompeo said, is that the Trump administration was committed to maintaining the deterrence structure that allowed the U.S. to draw down from roughly 15,000 troops in the country, when the deal was signed, to just 2,500 when Trump left office.

“We went from 15,000 troops to 2,500 troops and we still had order in Afghanistan,” he said. “There's almost triple that number of American forces on the ground now and there's complete chaos. So when someone asks 'could you have maintained this?' My response is 'for six months after the agreement was signed we didn't get a single American killed. We didn't have a single Taliban attack on an American.'"

Critics of the deal have argued that the Taliban were merely biding their time, holding off on attacking Americans to encourage withdrawal while using the resulting excess manpower to increase offensives against our Afghan allies. Pompeo acknowledges the Taliban repeatedly broke the agreement while Trump was still in office, but claims they would have gradually learned to meet their obligations thanks to targeted American retaliation.

“They broke the agreement a number of times: they moved forces where they weren't supposed to move, they put certain elements of the Afghan forces at risk. And every time that happened, General Scotty Miller crushed them,” he said. “We would call them and say 'you did X, we responded with Y,' stop doing X.' And we modeled a deterrence mechanism that told the Taliban if you push the Americans under Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo, there’ll be an enormous price to pay.”

“Contrast that with the Biden team, they pushed on the Americans and we retreated,” he continued. “As they took outlying areas and pushed into provincial capitals, the American military wasn't brought to bear.”

So, had Pompeo been running the show under a second Trump term, would he have resorted to surging in more troops in response to Taliban advances?

“I don’t think we would have had to,” he said.

Instead, the U.S. could have provided additional support to Afghan forces in the form of artillery, air support, and intelligence, while maintaining a small footprint — an argument that London, among others, has dismissed as fanciful, though some lawmakers and analysts suggest it could have been feasible.

Seeking to deflect the withering criticism he’s received from the press and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, Biden has argued his hands were tied: he could have either complied with the deadline negotiated by Pompeo or been forced to surge in more troops when the Taliban inevitably began attacking Americans for overstaying their welcome.

“I don’t know what planet he’s on,” Pompeo said in response to that argument, pointing out that Biden missed the May withdrawal deadline and the Taliban didn’t ramp up attacks. He went on to imply that, as secretary of state, he wouldn’t have withdrawn in May either, given the Taliban’s continued refusal to comply with the agreement.

“[Biden] says there was an unconditional commitment to leave in May. That's simply not true. Read the document,” he continued. “What we would have done is we would have continued to apply pressure.”

The degree to which the Taliban violated their commitment to break with Islamic extremists has become clearer in recent days. The al Qaeda-affiliated Haqqani network is reportedly running security inside Kabul, and American officials fear that a resurgent Islamic State will begin to attack the airport to escalate the conflict. Without a significant U.S. troop presence, some argue that Afghanistan is destined to become the new headquarters for global jihad.

Could this outcome really have been prevented without sending thousands more American troops into Afghanistan in defiance of Trump’s campaign promises?

Pompeo says unequivocally “yes.”

“The counter-terrorism effort that the Unites States has engaged in for twenty years goes far beyond Afghanistan,” he said, citing operations against al-Shabaab in Somalia and al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula.

“In many of those places, we are still able to deliver lethal capability to take down al-Qaeda,” he said. “So we have this narrative: ‘without 15,000 soldiers on the ground how do you defeat al Qaeda?’ I'd say, ‘we've done this for a long time and in many places.'”

Ultimately, Pompeo maintains he viewed the agreement as the starting point of a potentially years-long effort to extract the U.S. from the quagmire of Afghanistan. He says it was Biden’s insistence on viewing it as the end point that doomed the U.S. to failure.

“We knew this was going to take many, many months. Constantly trying to convince the Afghans that they were going to have to take down the temperature on their civil war,” he said. “That they were going to have to find a modus vivendi for power-sharing amongst the different tribes and ethnicities. This is a millennial project. I was under no illusion that this would happen on my watch.”

PHOTOS: Afghanistan Evacuation